The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

“We have come here to this water because this Rock is the last of the Quapaw Quarter sites,” she said. “Or the first, depending on how you look at it. Now our walk, our tour, is ended. And now I can ask you: Would you really like to stay in Little Rock? What do you think?”

  She might have picked a pleasanter place for such a discussion. The day’s soft and cooling breeze had ebbed in the stillness of the late afternoon, and the hot sun seemed to suck all the foul and rank odors from the river, the smell of mud, of rotting driftwood, of sewage, of dead fish and smelly live fish; and the river itself, dung-brown and ugly and scummed with bubbly swill, rolled indolently and turbidly but with an awful incessant resolve and monstrousness in its unrelenting push to join the Mississippi. I remembered that upstream several hundred yards, behind the old sewage disposal plant, an enormous excretory bubble belched upward from the surface of the river at regular intervals. Beneath us, frothy eddies swirled and lapped against the Rock, filled with little vicious whirlpools; gazing down at them, I felt a slight vertigo and anxiety, and also a curious recognition which soon clarified itself: this pattern of the brown tormented water had been re-created, not abstractly but almost literally, in those murals that Margaret had smeared on the walls of her room. I did not like it here, and I wished we could go some place else to talk, but I didn’t want to say this to Margaret. In fact, I couldn’t say anything for the moment anyway, because I had suddenly been stricken with an attack of sun sneezes. The heat of the sun on one’s face, counteracting the lower temperatures of the nasal chambers, creates a sudden chemical refrigeration in one’s head which results in distressing unseasonal sneezes, and I had a whole string of these things, a twenty-one-gun salute. “Heavens!” said Margaret, both amazed and sympathetic. “Excude me,” I sniffled. “It habbens eber so offen, whed the sun is sot.” Finally I got them under control, and blew my nose into my handkerchief. “I guess I’m just not cut out for this climate,” I said.

  “Oh, I’ll bet you sneeze in the sun in Boston too,” she said.

  “Well, I guess I do,” I admitted. “But the sun doesn’t shine so often in Boston. I’ve been here almost two weeks now and we’ve had hardly any rain.”

  “Droughts can be nice too, if you learn to like them,” she said.

  “Your whole life was a drought,” I said. “And so, for that matter, is the life of anybody who lives in this town, or this state, or the whole South. One big drought,” I said severely, accusingly. “Why indeed have we come here to this water?”

  “Why have you?” she said. “You’ve never really answered that question I first asked you: What are you doing in Little Rock? Why did you come home in the first place? Surely it wasn’t just to visit your father again.”

  I recalled my original notion, that wistfulness which had flitted through my head on that night before I left Boston, of using this vacation as an opportunity for reappraising my old hometown with a view toward resettling here and recapturing whatever stimulus the climate and physical environment had once given me, and I realized that all this time, not just today on this formal tour, but all the time since I got off the train a week ago last Monday morning, I had been searching and reappraising, sweeping the cobwebs out of that homesickness of mine, that nostalgia which corrupts all the wandered sons of this town and makes us keep coming home, again and again, long after we no longer have any use for the town. I told Margaret that even if I left again I would probably come back, perhaps in another year, perhaps not for three or four years, but I would always keep coming back, and, if so, maybe I should just stay here now and never leave, because I think I had found at last that thing which keeps me returning.

  And I acknowledged it to her: “Somehow it seems to me that the little lives of all these people, of this town and state, this whole permanently drought-stricken Southland, are intricately woven together, more than are the lives of the people of any other region or country. I don’t know why this is. I don’t think it has very much to do with the Confederacy or the Civil War in itself. I don’t even think it is because our names are Stone and Austin and Hawkins and Howard, or Johnson and Crittenden and Slater and Ashley. Maybe it’s because we have all been victims, in one way or another, of the South’s long and continuous tragedy. I don’t know. There really wouldn’t seem to be much brotherhood or kinship of any kind between a colored man and a white supremacist, would there? But there is. Because they are both Southerners, both permanently doomed by whatever living doom or damnation is the lot of us all. Or whatever honor or pride or shame. Take Naps and Dall, for instance. Both of them, I am willing to admit, are uncommonly intelligent. Naps is a college graduate, did you know that? Did you ever notice the Phi Beta Kappa key which dangles from his watch pocket? But sometimes he sounds like any old illiterate darkie, just as sometimes Dall sounds like the trashiest of hillbilly white trash. But Dall doesn’t have to talk like that. No, he doesn’t have to sound that way, neither does Naps. You know what I think? I think those guys, each in his own way, bear some kind of deep implacable pride in their backgrounds, their roots—Nap’s descent from poor Delta slaves, Dall’s descent from poor Ozark mountain folk—and their speech is a kind of living monument to the past. They know it’s bad speech, it’s improper and imperfect and all, and that’s all the more reason why they use it, to flaunt the coarse glory of the Old South in the languid face of the New South, to keep reminding themselves, and us, that the South’s past, however bad or improper or imperfect it was, had a rich character which modern civilization is taking away from us. Like a couple of old sailors who won’t give up the old ship, even long after that old ship has gone down they still cling to fragments of it because even these fragments, warped and weathered and useless, are somehow more beautiful than a whole new modern ship could ever be.”

  She smiled. “Let’s sit on porches and grow old together and talk about the coarse glory of the Old South,” she said, her arm linked cozily through mine. “And Dall will be our best friend, a brother to both of us. He will be the old kindly Chief of Police and he will come and sit on the porch with us, still speaking those same old back-country words, and we will all grow old together and be good friends. And Naps too.”

  “But I don’t know you,” I said. “I don’t think I ever knew you, and I doubt if I ever could.”

  “It’s because you’ve never tried,” she said.

  “I have tried,” I said, “but it does me no good.”

  “You’ve never tried,” she said.

  “It does me no good, because you seem to change so much. You’re never the same person twice. It’s not just a split personality, it’s a fragmented personality.”

  “You take things at face value,” she said, “or you want to, or try to. But my face has no value, and you’ve never gone behind it.”

  “All I’ve ever had to go by is what you say, and you’ve never said very much to me. You’ve never told me who you really are. Whom have you every really loved? Are you carrying a torch for somebody?”

  “No. I’ve got a lighted match in my hand, and I’m waiting for somebody to come along with a torch that I can ignite.” She paused to light herself a cigarette, then she went on. “Just now you were offering up such a lucid and logical analysis about the South and how we are all bound together and why Naps and Dall talk the way they do, and you sounded so perceptive, so rational, that I was sitting here telling myself: If he can make such brilliant theories about something like that, then maybe he can finally theorize about me. That’s why I said let’s sit on porches and grow old together. Because maybe we could see each other enough, and talk to each other enough, so that finally you would know who I am. And then you could tell me. And you might even learn who you are.”

  “I might learn that I am your father,” I said.

  “Now what do you mean by that?” she asked, but I think she didn’t really have to ask, because, uneasily, she knew.

  “I mean that whoever will sit on those porches and grow old together with you will have to serve a
s your father for you. You’ve heard of ‘father figures’? Oedipal or Electral feelings and all that?”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling wryly. “Somebody to wield a firm hand over me, somebody to keep me out of mischief, somebody to punish me when I’m bad, is that it?”

  “You get the idea,” I said.

  “Probably you’re right,” she said. “I remember once when I was a girl, oh, eight or nine years old, I was at my great-aunt’s funeral, and while all the grownups were inside the house listening to the service, all the kids were out in the yard playing, and I was up in a little tree hanging from a limb by my knees, upside down, you know, with my dress flopping down over my head, and my father came out of the house and reproached me severely, telling me to get down out of that tree and quit showing my panties to all the world. Innocent as I was, I had no idea that there was anything wrong with showing my panties, and if it hadn’t been for my father, I probably never would have known any better. So that’s what I need, is it? Somebody to tell me when I shouldn’t show my panties to the world?”

  I laughed. “Sort of,” I said.

  “Then you wouldn’t fill the bill,” she said, “because you don’t remind me of my father in the slightest, and you aren’t firm enough or authoritarian enough, and you are always so preoccupied with whatever is going on in your own mind that you never would notice if my panties were showing or not. I remember once back in high school, when I was a junior and I felt nobody seemed the least bit aware of my existence, nobody ever looked at me or spoke to me, and even you…you never complimented me or even commented on my dress or my appearance, so one day I came to school wearing the most outlandish outfit, just to see what would happen, just to see if anybody would notice, I had on one black shoe and one white shoe, one orange sock and one green sock, and a pair of polka-dot pedal-pushers—that was a time when pedal-pushers were banned at high school—and my hair in pigtails and a horrible old plumed hat on my head, but nobody even looked at me! And you…you never said a word about it!”

  “I remember that,” I said. “I was so embarrassed I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want anybody to see me with you. I thought you’d gone completely off your rocker.”

  “Oh?” Her surprise lasted for a long moment and then she said, “Well, that’s what I mean, then. If my panties were showin, you’d be too embarrassed to mention it to me, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly—”

  “And another thing. You never once—not once did you ever discuss anything serious with me. You never even brought up the subject of sex. Why not? I remember how you used to paw me, and you always had something wicked on your mind, but you never put it into words. Why not? I didn’t know a single thing about the subject, and I needed somebody to tell me what it was all about, and how it was fun, and how it was a normal, decent thing which happens between male and female all the time. I didn’t know this, and I worried myself sick about it, and you never said a word. Why not? I ask you.”

  “Maybe I didn’t know very much about it myself at the time. But I distinctly recall that I had the impression you knew all about it, because, after all, I remember you told me what a gigolo was. We heard the word in a movie or read it in a book or some place, and you explained to me what it was. I didn’t know. You did.”

  “I told you it was a man hired by a woman for the purpose of entertaining her. I didn’t know what kind of entertainment, though.”

  Tell me,” I said, “how did you ever manage to find out about sex, if, as you claim, you’re still a virgin?”

  “I still don’t know much about it,” she said. “But in junior college I had three dates—three dates in two years—and from those three I picked up the rudiments, at least. Did I ever tell you about them? Well, the first was with a football player named Bink Conley. Bink was a big husky guy but he seemed kindly and decent and honorable, and he was rather shy. He took me roller-skating once, and then afterward we drove out some lonely old dirt road and parked, and drank some whiskey, and when he began petting me I told him I was a virgin and didn’t know the first thing about the matter and that he had better explain to me what it was all about. Well, apparently that was one subject he knew something about and wasn’t the least bit shy of discussing. So I received my first lecture on the facts of life from Bink Conley. ‘See, it’s like this,’ he explained. ‘I got me this big old prick’—that’s what he called it—‘and you got you that there little old hole, so what I do is, see, I take my prick and stick it up into your hole and sort of work it around in there, in and out’—and he began to demonstrate with the forefinger of one hand clenched in the fist of his other hand—‘and it gets faster and faster, feelin real good, see, and before long I shoot my wad, and it’s the best feelin there is, I’m tellin yuh, and then I kind of relax and it’s all done.’ So I said to him, ‘Well, that’s all very interesting, but what am I supposed to get out of it?’ and he gave me this blank look, kind of surprised-looking, and he scratched his head and thought about that for a while, and then he said, ‘Well, I guess it must feel sort of good to you too, and that’s what you get out of it. Come on, I’ll show yuh.’ But I asked him, ‘What if that big old prick won’t fit into this little old hole? What if it pricks me? What if it hurts?’ and he said, ‘Aw, it won’t, I guarantee yuh.’ And he kept saying that over and over again, but he had scared the daylights out of me, and even if I had been dying of desire I was probably so tightly constricted he never would have been able to get it in, and I didn’t want him to try, so I made him take me home.”

  She paused to light another cigarette. Why is she so open and frank with me this time? I wondered. A compulsion to confess? Is she desperate again because of the lateness of the hour, because I’m leaving? Am I leaving? If she will talk to me like this on porches forever, perhaps not. I smiled at her, and she smiled back, and went on.

  “My second date was with a nice, good-looking pre-med student and he was about your size, so I decided that his wouldn’t be quite so big as Bink’s—I always had the notion, up until last night, in fact, that physical size determines phallic size—and this pre-med student took me to a movie and did a little petting during the movie and he was so nice about it, such a polite and well-spoken gentleman, that I decided I would let him do it, so after the movie we drove toward that same lonely dirt road, but on the way a cat crossed the road and he swerved the car to hit it and made a self-satisfied chuckle and said, ‘Got the bastard!’ and he had, he had smashed it flat, and I was so upset I slapped him hard and got out of the car and walked home.

  “But I was still convinced I might find somebody to do it with, and I was willing to try.”

  I interrupted: “You mean you were really trying to get yourself laid?”

  “Don’t look at it that way,” she said. “Just say that I was nearly twenty years old and curious to know what sex was all about. My third and last date at JC was with my English teacher. He was a young bachelor and although he wasn’t especially good-looking he was very intelligent and an interesting person to talk to. He invited me to come up to his apartment and discuss my grades with him, because I wasn’t doing too well in his course. I wrote good themes and always got A’s on them, but my test scores were low because I just wouldn’t take the trouble to memorize all the facts, William Blake’s wife’s name and Coleridge’s birthplace, and so forth. So I went up to his apartment and he made a cocktail shaker full of martinis and we drank them and talked for a while about the meaning of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’ but it was obvious to me what was on his mind, and I think he must have realized it was on my mind too. Well, there was a sort of spontaneous combustion: we both stood up from our chairs at the same time and met in a mad embrace and he kissed me all over my neck and face and began pressing himself up against me and I could feel his thing all stiff and swollen inside his pants against my groin, and he began rubbing it against me, but then all of a sudden he trembled and sprang away from me and turned
his back to me and bent over and clutched himself down there, and he was so quiet and reserved for a while I thought to ask him what was the matter, but I didn’t know how to put it, I didn’t even know the precise meaning of the word orgasm and with all those martinis in me I couldn’t think of any way of expressing it except the way Bink Conley had put it, and I thought if Bink Conley put it that way it must be current coin, so I put my arm around my English teacher’s shoulders sympathetically and asked, ‘Did you shoot your wad?’ and he turned and gave me a look as if I were the most reprehensible sort of uncouth harlot, and he was very cool toward me for the rest of the evening, and my grade in English that semester was an F.”

  She paused and waited until I had quit laughing, and then she concluded: “Those were my three dates, and I didn’t have any others until I got out of college. And still I’m a virgin, and it’s all my own fault, I guess, because, like last night, I’ve had several chances not to be one. I’ve always been very interested in sex, perhaps obsessed with it, and you’d think I would have learned something about it, but I haven’t. I’m still as ignorant as ever. When I was nine or ten years old, in the summertime, I’d take a quilt out to the back yard and lie down on it and open the Montgomery Ward catalog and spend hour after hour looking at all those hygienic devices and contraptions—suspensories and leg-strap urinals and French trusses and scrotal trusses and stem pessories and syringes and douche powders and sanitary belts and all—and I knew they had something to do with sex and the bodily functions but I didn’t know what, and I spent so much time trying to figure them out…”

  “Hell,” I said, “I used to study those Ward and Sears catalogues too, and I still don’t understand them. Suspensories always kept me in suspense.”

  “…And those advertisements in magazines,” she said, “those elegant, smug, secretive ads, like the ones that said Modess, because…because of what? I wondered. Because why?”