The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Dall isn’t coming home,” I said.

  “What?” she said and her face was alarmed. “Why not?”

  “He’s in the hospital,” I said.

  “What?” she cried.

  “I said he’s in the hospital.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He got trampled by a horse named Houyhnhnm,” I said.

  “Jimmy’s gelding! How did it happen? Is he hurt badly? Which hospital? When did it happen? Did Jimmy—?”

  So I gave her the whole story, and near the end of my narrative she began to cry, I think it was when I mentioned that business about Dall asking me to feed his dog, and her crying got harder and harder until finally she had to bury her face in her hands. Sitting there like that with her face in her hands, racked with sobs, obstructing the flow of my narrative, she gave me a sudden memory of the way her mother had looked the other afternoon when she had put on that fake weeping show. But Margaret’s tears were very real. And they weren’t for herself at all.

  Even after I had finished the story, down to the last detail, she continued to cry, and I could do nothing to stop it. I told her Dall was getting along just fine and the doctors said they wouldn’t have to open his skull after all—and I even tried to make a cheerful joke by saying it was a good thing they wouldn’t have to open his skull because they might be shocked to find nothing there, ha! ha!—but I don’t think she was even listening to me any longer.

  Finally she got up from the kitchen table and went into the living room, where it was dark, and she lay down on the sofa and continued crying. I went in there and sat down beside her and stroked her forehead. Eventually she stopped crying, and her eyes were closed and I thought she might be asleep. Flat on her back like that, in the dusk of the room, her hands crossed upon her waist, she seemed like a Renaissance tomb sculpture, a supine Haria del Carretto or some such alabaster maiden lying quietly in a state that is neither death nor sleep but the pure image of both. Her breasts, however, were not alabaster but rising and falling swells palpitant beneath their coverings of cotton and playtex, and I began gently to palpate them, and she did not protest beyond an initial slight squirm. Screwing up courage, I lay down beside her, crowding her over toward the back of the sofa. One nice thing about being short: sofas fit. For a while my fingertips lightly twiddled the lengthening nipples as detected in their embroidered nylon sanctums, and I gnawed on her earlobe. Then my hand went south, but even then she did nothing to stop me. Even when I hooked my finger under the edge of the crotch of her panties and with it found and fondled the growing and moistening clitoral bud in its tender labial cove, the only sound from her was her breathing. Fortunae cetera mando. By and by, when it seemed that such titillations would have kindled fires in any woman, I made bold to swing a leg up over onto her, and then another leg, and then slowly and gently to commence a mock, clothes-hindered venery which, make-believe though it was, served to distend me to the point where just the feel of my thick trouser-bound tool riding up and down across her panty-clad canyon would itself have been a fine joy and redemptive and obliterate gratification had I not wanted something better, and it served, too, to give her notice of my intentions so that she could get herself ready emotionally in whatever manner she chose. But if she was doing anything to get ready, emotionally or physically, she wasn’t much showing it. Still as still as a stillborn child, she neither stirred nor stiffened nor stopped me. Could she really be sleeping through all this? Now it is my experience to know that Pamela, whenever she gave in, gave in completely to the point of absolute impassive submission and such lifelessness that only a necrophiliac could have enjoyed it. So if Margaret were going to turn out to be only another Pamela-type dead-end dishrag, I wasn’t so sure that I wanted her after all…But I thought I might as well try anyway; maybe the act itself would resuscitate her. Wherefore I slipped a free hand down between us and unzipped my fly. The faint whir of the parting zipper, alas, sounded in the dark stillness of the night like some prehistoric pterodactyl grinding his mandibles, and it woke her, it woke her from whatever sleep or reverie or shy withdrawal she was in, and she spoke to me, murmuring some words so timidly stifled that I had to incline my ear against her mouth to catch them, and even then I had to ask her to repeat herself, and she did, just a little less suppressed: “Will you stay?” And I, thinking she meant simply would I stay with her through the night, replied, “Certainly,” and then realized my voice was much too loud, and realized too that I might be giving the wrong answer to the wrong question, and lowered my voice, fought it down to this quiet question: “Do you mean will I stay in Little Rock forever?”

  She was silent for a moment, a moment during which I felt my manhood flop and shrink and during which I got off of her and lay beside her to ponder this turning of my analogy: that if I wanted the town, I would have to stay in it; if I wanted her, I would have to stay with her. “Yes,” she answered. Then I became distressed, beside myself. Clutching her tightly, I awkwardly babbled a nearly incoherent explanation of why I could not stay, and why I thought she should go with me, until she drew away from me and I realized I was not only incoherent but perhaps irrational as well, then I stopped. I just shut up altogether, and pressed my face into that dale between her breasts and became as still and quiet as she. Thus we remained a long while. Sometime later she raised her head slowly and kissed me lightly on the brow. I didn’t move. Later still her hand crept across my waist and entered the unzipped fly and parted the curtains of my shorts and took out my dead extension and slowly stroked it back to life. Now, I thought, now the town and its agent, this sorceress and succubus, are trying to seduce me. I didn’t move. Awkwardly and unskillfully she did it, hesitantly rubbing the underside of it with her palm, and I wanted to show her how, but I didn’t move. For a long time, fifteen minutes or so, she slowly caressed it, beginning to explore it from stem to stern with the pads of her fingertips, until I thought it might explode, but I didn’t move. All on her own, she closed her fingers around it and began a rhythm which steadily swiftened to a fierce abandon. Sweat was streaming down the sides of my face, but I didn’t move. When the time came that she sensed the involuntary sinews were about to throb and heave, she put her other hand into the pocket of her blouse and took out a small hankie whose lilac scent my nostrils caught in passing, and she wrapped this around the pulsing crown, and then I moved. I clung to her and shook and felt myself thumping inside of her tight fist. When it was over, sudden waves of sleep began to crowd down on me, and I was able to fight them off for only a short while. Then as I let myself be caught up in them and swept off into nothingness, out of detumescent shame and frustration and anger I uttered a final question: “Is that what you did for Slater?”

  The drowsiness pressed me down as into a dark well, and as in a dark well her answer had muted echoes, far away and not altogether intelligible, and perhaps only sounds inside my own head already in sleep: “No. It’s what I did for myself.”

  When I awakened, the sun was well up in the sky, and she was gone.

  Chapter thirty-seven

  I was standing in the morning sunlight at the kitchen window, drinking a cup of tepid leftover coffee and staring vacuously out at the back yard as if I expected to see Bowzer come trotting home at any minute, when she returned. She came trotting into the kitchen with a bag of groceries, threw me a very cheery “Good morning!” and unpacked her groceries and began to fry some bacon and eggs. I didn’t say anything in answer to her extravagantly gay greeting. I just watched her. She glanced at me and said, “My, how grumpy you look this morning! Didn’t you sleep well?”

  “What are you sounding so goddamn merry about?” I asked grumpily.

  “I went to see Doyle,” she said. “And he’s just fine. I told him all my troubles, and he advised me and counseled me, and now I feel much better.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “He told me I should go with you.”

  “Bully for him!” I said, delighted, sending the old
buddy a telepathic message of thanks.

  “But,” she continued, “he said that I ought to try to convince you that you should stay in Little Rock. Because he wants you to stay too. Doyle loves you like a brother, did you know that?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but very rarely do brothers ever spend their lives together in the same town.” Then I said, “Well, do you want to go with me?”

  “Sit down and eat your breakfast,” she said. I sat down, and she put first a bowl of Rice Chex (psychic girl!) and then a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon in front of me, and even buttered my toast, and it was a cozy domestic scene. She sat down across from me and started in on her own plate. The food was very good; I realized how much practice she had had all these years as cook for the Austin-Polk household. I complimented her on the crispness of the bacon, and then I reminded her of my question. She said, “No.” Why not? I asked her. “I’ve already told you,” she said. “What’s the point? We could spend our whole lives here in this city and never get to know it all. Why should we wander restlessly around the world?”

  “All right,” I said challengingly. “If I do leave, and you stay here, then what are you going to do?”

  “I’ve managed this long,” she said, not looking up at me.

  “All right,” I said. “Those are your terms, then? I stay: I get you. I leave: I lose you.”

  She nodded.

  “Christ!” I moaned in exasperation. “What a decision!”

  We ate our eggs and bacon in silence. Then she stood up. “So now if you will finish your coffee,” she said, “I would like for you to go with me on that little walking tour of this town.”

  Never, never before had I ever looked at the old burg with quite the same eyes, as though searching desperately for something I had missed before, as though trying to create quaint and wondrous facades to hide all its lackluster and jejunity, as though the future of my very soul depended upon my success in finding some redeeming quality in this lost city. Far from being any Diogenes-like search for honesty, or Lot-like search for goodness, it was the search of a sophisticated world-traveler trying to find any usefulness in the desolated site of his irretrievable youth. Even though I had convinced myself, at the outset, that regardless of what distaste or boredom or uneasiness I felt toward the town I would still stay here, I would stay here if that is what I had to do in order to have Margaret, still I was qualmishly skeptical. For her part, she was trying hard to show me the nice things about it: the architectural grace of its old buildings—the classic Albert Pike Memorial Temple and the Old State House and the few fine antebellum houses; and the architectural tastefulness of some of the new modern buildings—the public library (which I had already studied thoroughly), the new office buildings, and even such things as an unusually attractive motel called the Coachman’s Inn (where, I recalled, we had planned to stay together, and where we might yet stay together if only I came to my senses). I guess we must have walked a good six or seven miles that day, and even the weather seemed to be co-operating: although the sun was bright a constant breeze came up out of the south and kept us continually cool, and sometimes the soughing sound of that breeze seemed to be carrying the ghost of old Stephen Foster melodies, “Beautiful Dreamer” and “Old Folks at Home” and “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming” as the straining strings of André Kostelanetz’ orchestra might have reinterpreted and haunted them. All in all, I probably never had a finer day in Little Rock in my life. Or a more irresolute one.

  Margaret said not a word about herself, or me, but talked only about the town. The Metropolitan Little Rock area, she told me, now had almost 270,000 inhabitants within its 781 square miles, and that was a lot of people, and a lot of room. Little Rock University, which had only been a small junior college when she attended it, was fast on its way to becoming a large, complex institution. The city police force, in case Dall hadn’t told me (he hadn’t), consisted of a total of 188 able-bodied and benevolent gentlemen. There was a growing industrial complex south of town (I had caught a glimpse of it from Naps’s window) which would some day be positively gigantic. The Little Rock Philharmonic was a pretty fair symphony orchestra. In addition to the somewhat lackadaisical Playmakers organization (which was doing Slater’s Red Shoes), there was also an active Community Theatre of Greater Little Rock, Inc., and between the two of them they put on some fine plays. The Heights movie theater often showed the best of foreign and domestic art-cinema. There were restaurants which, in specializing in Mexican, Italian, and Chinese foods, Margaret (although she had never eaten in one of them) knew had no equals anywhere. The six municipal parks covered a total of 1,600 acres. Little Rock led the entire nation in the progress of its urban renewal. When dredging and lock-building were finished, the Arkansas would be opened up to navigation, and Little Rock once again would be a port city. When Faubus was finally ousted, the state would elect an intelligent and far-sighted man to replace him, and then things would begin to happen all over. Everything pointed to a beautiful future.

  After a humdinger sandwich luncheon in the Pebble Room of the Tower Building (I had shaved with Dall’s razor and my seersucker suit, although wrinkled, wasn’t entirely unpresentable), we spent the afternoon exploring the so-called Quapaw Quarter, which I had never even heard of before. Margaret explained that this was a group of twelve widely scattered historic sites and structures which were in or near a section of the city surveyed back in 1818 and designated as a kind of early reservation for the Quapaw Indians, later usurped by the prosperous white landowners. Here, within a seven-block radius, we could find almost all of the interesting antebellum and postbellum sites and sights of the city, and we did: we spent nearly an hour in the 1843 Trapnall Hall, a low classic mansion patterned after the best Southern style of Gideon Shyrock, elegantly appointed with giran-doled chandeliers, gold walls and draperies, and surprisingly good Empire furniture (I deigned to impress Margaret with my connoiseurship by identifying and dating and provenancing each and every piece in the house, from the Chinese Chippendale sofa to the brass padfooted andirons); we spent another hour studying the exteriors of the 1846 Ionic-columned Absolom Fowler House, now a nice day nursery for St. Andrew’s, the 1873 “Steamboat Gothic” Augustus Garland House, the 1840 Albert Pike House, and others; we looked at historical documents and artifacts in the Old State House and in the Old Arsenal of City Park, General MacArthur’s birthplace; and we spent still another hour on a tour of the extensive Territorial Restoration, its pioneer-rustic Tavern Room with the perforated-tin milk safe that is the twin of Tatrice Howard’s milk safe, its old kitchens and parlors, its early print shop, and its beautifully landscaped grounds with massive black walnut and magnolia trees. I had been through the Territorial Restoration at least a dozen times before, once with Pamela after our honeymoon, but this was the first time I could bring to it such a formidable depth of recognition and perception. “If only Little Rock still looked like this,” I said to Margaret, gesturing my hand in a wide arc to indicate the rugged primal elegance of the place. “But it doesn’t.”

  Still I had to admit to her that our long walk had made me discover aspects of the town which I had never known before, and I had to agree that this whole area of town, east of Main, had an old and hushed charm—no two houses were identical in the whole section, and this in itself was a great relief from the sameness of the new suburbs. I guess I could live here after all, I told myself, spotting a delightful old house or two which, if carefully restored with authentic furnishings, would make an appropriate base of operations for me.

  But wait! I cautioned myself. Perhaps you’ve discovered—or uncovered—more of the town, but you still don’t know the girl.

  Chapter thirty-eight

  One of the historic sites of the Quapaw Quarter we missed: the Mt. Holly Cemetery, sometimes referred to as the Westminster Abbey of Arkansas. Margaret said it was too far out of the way, but I suspected her real reason was that she thought I had seen enough moribundity already without visiting a cemeter
y. So our last stop, our last station on the trail of Quapaw Quarter sites, was the Rock itself, La Petite Roche, a hefty but comparatively small hunk of greenish-gray schist and sandstone bulging up from the bank of the Arkansas River at the foot of Rock Street beneath the Rock Island Railroad bridge. I had been here before too, but the last time I had seen it this was a weedy junk-strewn shore where the bodies of gar and catfish rotted in the sun and hobos and other vagrants lit their little fires at night and East Side punks and their loose girls came and screwed madly in the scrubby bushes and left behind a litter of toilet paper and used condoms, and a nearby junk dealer’s warehouse vomited a hideous black disgorgement of old battery cases down the bank of the river. Now except for broken glass everywhere the place had a certain civic neatness and decency to it, and the Rock itself was capped with a granite monument and a commemorative bronze plaque explaining how Bernard de la Harpe had discovered the Rock in 1722 and how he had called it the Little Rock to distinguish it from the “Big Rock” bluff farther up the river on the other side, and how it was used as the beginning point of the Quapaw Line. We walked down thirty-one steps, holding to a pipe railing, to get to the Rock, and, after reading the plaque, we sat down on the base of the monument with our backs up against it, and stared at the river. It was a secluded place, remote and private.

  This river means many things, but the one thing it meant to me at that moment, coming down to it like that, was that it was the ominous instrument with which Margaret might have wanted to destroy herself at one time. I glanced at her suspiciously, and then I said, “Why have we come here to this water?”

  She returned my suspicious glance and answered, “I suppose Doyle has told you everything I ever said to him, including that.”

  “Not everything,” I said.