The Incident at Naha

by M. J. Bosse

  Proudly Mr. Purdy escorted us down the aisles illuminated with shafts of multi-colored light. On top of the consoles and on the walls and hanging from the ceiling were such things as Mexican masks; African sculptures—but the cheap kind you see in novelty shops on Times Square; model airplanes; stuffed birds; and kewpie dolls, kewpie dolls everywhere, and all staring at you stupidly and insanely from their glass eyes; and hula hoops; and dime-store landscapes of mountains and forests in flimsy curlicued frames; and china plates; and long-handled bed warmers. On many of the consoles lay fruit, generally apples and peaches, in various stages of decomposition. There was the sweet smell of rot in the air. There were pump-driven toy waterfalls, all intricate-looking and gaudily colored, and those working had flashing lights behind the splashing water. There was an aquarium filled to the brim but without fish—its aeration system working, though, and awful-looking threads of something moving in the water. There were plenty of women’s nylon stockings, draped sort of like moss, on the consoles.

  I picked up a colorful piece of petrified wood and examined it while the two men walked ahead of me, Mr. Purdy leading and visibly proud of his collection. Triumphantly he pointed out a wooden pagoda which had been carved by an Indonesian sailor. A dead tree, five feet high, stuck in a bucket, sat in a little island of empty space. In its dry branches rested an open parasol and all sizes and shapes of women’s panties and fancy hats. In the entire room there were only three available sitting places: two on an overstuffed settee, which Virgil and I took, and a straight chair, onto which Mr. Purdy slowly lowered his bulk. “One hundred and thirteen lights in this room,” he announced. “Think of the electric bill. Most of them turn on and off individually. Turning them off at night is a task that takes twelve to thirteen minutes of my time,” he said with the sigh of a martyr. “Pay a woman twenty dollars a week just to tidy up.”

  “I believe it,” I said.

  “Not clean, mind you—just tidy up. I trust her because everything is left exactly as it should be.” He sort of glared at us defensively, then cleared his throat and said, “I won’t have things moved. I have a precise knowledge of the position of each item in my collection.”

  I was staring at long black opera gloves, about a dozen of them, hanging from a hula hoop; each glove hung at a different length.

  “Young lady,”—Mr. Purdy met my eyes—“if, for example, you were to move one of those gloves an inch, I would know it.”

  On a small table by the settee sat seven or eight paperweights. I extended my hand, paused. “May I?”

  “Permit me.” Mr. Purdy lifted all of himself out of his chair, crabbed a few steps over to the table, and picked up and displayed each paperweight so that I could examine it without laying a finger on any surface.

  “An amazing collection,” enthused Virgil.

  Mr. Purdy guffawed sort of like that actor in the movies, that Sidney Greenstreet. “Let me show you the pièce de résistance,” he said. We got up and followed him as he swayed down another aisle like a surefooted elephant, careful not to brush up against dead plants, dolls, rocks, and stuffed animals. And pipes. I saw four or five along the way. A Gambier, a Pot, a Corncob, and a Churchwarden all lying in heaps of dust. I realized that the cleaning lady really did have explicit instructions about her job. She was hired to rub away dust around objects, never under them; and to avoid touching anything, she left a wide circular margin of dust around each object. Because things occupied about ninety percent of the console surfaces, Mr. Purdy’s room was mathematically mostly dust. In fact, as we moved down the aisle, our feet and the motion of our bodies lifted great waves of it, the motes dancing before our eyes like insects rising in a swamp. At one end of the room Mr. Purdy stopped. I noticed below his food-stained shirt and rumpled pants a pair of tennis shoes with gaping holes in them.

  “The pièce de résistance,” he crowed, and he gestured grandly toward an alcove, lit weirdly by an overhead lantern with a red bulb inside. Featured was an enormous bed draped in purple velvet, and beside it stood a large bronze gong.

  He exclaimed, “The Bed of Love and the Gong of Accomplishment!” For an instant I thought he had winked at me. Then he pointed to something framed above the bed, and in the eerie light we leaned forward and squinted at an article from The Wall Street Journal, the paper yellowed and curling under glass, which cited Mr. Purdy as an expert in something called Security Indexes.

  “That is highly complimentary,” Virgil said, and he refused to return my look of astonishment. I mean, Virgil was as calm and dignified as if everything happening to us was exactly what he had expected, the jive artist.

  Beaming at us for a moment, Mr. Purdy turned and began leading us back through the collection. Suddenly he halted and peered closely at the top of one of the consoles. “You moved that, one of you.” He pointed to the piece of petrified wood I had examined.

  “I did it,” I confessed.

  “Please don’t do it again,” Mr. Purdy said kind of gruffly, and he shuffled on.

  We came to the far end of the room, where one wall was a bank of photographs. And they were some photographs. In each of them Mr. Purdy was smoking a cigar and holding a champagne glass and posing heroically next to, like, a real live trollop. I mean, there they were, the last of the red-hot mamas. In half the photos they were naked, at least to the waist, and in one shot Mr. Purdy was making a noble attempt to cover with only his two normal-sized hands two of the most enormous boobs I have ever seen in my life. The photos had been taken either in the alcove, next to the Bed of Love and the Gong of Accomplishment, or in the kitchen, but never in the large room where his collection was. I guess that would have been sacrilege.

  We were standing there in front of his art gallery when Virgil asked if he just might wander around a little by himself, because he hadn’t seen everything (that would have taken weeks), and it really fascinated him. Mr. Purdy was obviously flattered, but there was a long, thoughtful pause before he gave his consent. With a little shake of his finger, he warned Virgil not to touch.

  Then Mr. Purdy turned to me. “I want you to see something,” he said, taking my arm and leading me into the kitchen. There was something about Mr. Purdy that put me on guard—probably the absolutely wild look he had in those photographs—but I knew that Virgil wanted time to examine the pipes lying around, so I went along with the old man into the kitchen. He took me straight to the window, which looked awfully bright, probably because it was the only window in the entire place that hadn’t been boarded up. There Mr. Purdy handed me a pair of binoculars and told me to look out the window. I did.

  “No, not that way, my dear.” He lowered my sights from the opposite rooftops to the street. “There. What do you see?”

  “People.”

  “No, no, no—across the street, directly across.”

  “Well, do you mean that TV-repair shop?”

  “I watch that place. Yes I do. And when they discard a console, I get my dolly and go down the freight elevator and have the console back up here in a jiffy.”

  I lowered the binoculars and looked at him. “Well,” I said vaguely, “how about that.”

  Mr. Purdy was smiling the way he was in those photographs, and I didn’t like it. What I thought had been a wink in the other room had been.

  “My dear,” he said in a half whisper, leaning toward me, “would you like to come to a party?”

  “Well,” I said—trying to smile, holding the binoculars in both hands at my chest—“really, Mr. Purdy, I figure you groove to more mature women.”

  “Groove?”

  “Like.”

  And now he winked. “Never too late to change.”

  “Oh, Mr. Purdy,” I said, edging past him. I felt him close behind me as I quickstepped out of the kitchen. Finished or not, Virgil was going to see me return. When I reached the kitchen door, with Mr. Purdy hovering over me, I saw Virgil bent over one of the consoles, in his hand the plastic stem of the Corncob.

  Over my head boomed
Mr. Purdy’s voice. “What are you doing!”

  “Your pipes need cleaning,” Virgil said sheepishly, and he gingerly replaced the Corncob on a bed of dust. Virgil headed for the front door, and I didn’t need him to tell me to follow. I went down one aisle and over my shoulder I saw Mr. Purdy coming along another, rolling along like an old tugboat on invisible waves. He was mumbling. “Young Maynard . . . sending all these people . . . they all touch something. . . .”

  I met Virgil at the door and we watched Mr. Purdy approaching, his chins blubbering from anger. “Touching things,” we heard, and rather than wait for him, I put the binoculars, which I was still clutching, there on the floor. Dust rose like the vapor from dry ice. Out the front door, we kept going fast and descended the nine floors without exchanging a word. Standing inside the front entrance, before stepping out into the sunlight, I said, “Wow.” I said, “He was an original.”

  From where we stood, I could see the TV-repair shop across the street. “Did you know he wanted to ring the Gong of Accomplishment with me?” I told Virgil.

  “What?”

  “Never mind that,” I said. “Did you find any film?”

  Virgil took my arm and we stepped out into the bright noisy air. “The Corncob was empty.”

  “You sure the Corncob was the right pipe? I saw others.”

  “Professor Maynard told me he’d given Mr. Purdy a Corncob. It was the one piece of information I got from him—and a good thing, too, in view of Mr. Purdy’s reluctance to have his collection touched.”

  “Can you be sure Mr. Purdy hadn’t already removed the film?”

  “With the possible exception of his teeth, that man has never willingly cleaned anything in his life.”

  “Long live the Stock Exchange,” I said.

  *

  Our next stop was in the opposite end of town, the lower East Side, where motion is paced down to the slow stagger of Bowery dreams. We were going to an artist’s studio, and in order to get into the building we had to climb over bodies in the entranceway—the sleeping drunks were like logs floating in a stagnant pond. The odor of booze hung in the hall so tangibly you would swear you were seeing as well as smelling it. This was a kind of pollution which had little to do with the ecological effect of Wall Street, or maybe too much to do with it, and the sort of wild good humor that Mr. Jeremy Purdy had got me into changed into another bag, that of sadness, as I glanced back down the rickety stairway where the guys were sprawled. It was a heavy climb, five long flights, but I was three steps ahead of Virgil, because it was an artist’s studio we were heading for, and that was my thing.

  Virgil had called for an appointment in this case, because the artist was well known and probably busy. So when we knocked on the studio door, Nick Parma was ready for us. Nick Parma, a real Mediterranean type—short, stocky, broad as a house, darkly good-looking—gestured us in. He was wearing tight jeans over powerful thighs and a T shirt that displayed terrific biceps, none too common for a man in his fifties.

  My nostrils instantly filled with the smell of oil paints, a groovier smell to me than that of Mr. Purdy’s rotting fruit. And there was another sharp contrast to Mr. Purdy’s place: this studio was absolutely bare, white-walled, antiseptically clean. A floor-to-ceiling rack occupied one side of the studio, where Parma stored his canvases, and on a large easel sat one of his paintings, probably four by six. Otherwise we might have been in a hospital. Essentially the painting was a field of blue on a green background, with a single controlling image, that of a centered and stenciled number 73. The green had a bumpy texture, possibly created by the application of plastic cement. The blue had a, like, luminous quality. “How do you get that groovy blue—with glazes?”

  “Liquitex over gesso,” Parma said, and he gave me an inquiring glance. “Beers?” We said yes, and when he left the room to get them and we stood there in front of the canvas, Virgil whispered, “What’s the number for?”

  “I don’t know, but isn’t it effective?”

  Virgil arched his eyebrows at me. Parma returned with beers and said that Maynard explained our project. “Does it really matter?” he asked Virgil. “A journal about a trip to Japan a hundred years ago?”

  “It could matter to historians.”

  Parma turned to me. “You study art?” And he didn’t say it as if he were interested because I was a girl, but as if he really wanted to know. So I was encouraged and launched into my predilection—that was actually the word I used—for Near Eastern Art. We stood facing his painting while I talked away. I wasn’t sure if he could place me, I mean how much I knew about art, so maybe that’s why he said, “I like the battle-axes from Luristan. You know, first millennium.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said doubtfully.

  “Don’t you think there are definite similarities between the Luristan animal motifs and certain ritual vases of the Shang period?”

  “Oh, yes.” But I was, like, lost.

  “I mean, especially the tendency in both arts to metamorphose one animal into another.”

  “Of course. Yes,” I said. For a moment I almost expounded from my term paper about Assyrian foot sculpting. Instead I said impulsively, “I saw your last show at the Decker Gallery!”

  Parma’s serious expression changed into a boyish smile. “You really did?”

  “Yes”—and actually I had. “You seemed to be going in a new direction. I mean, more like this one here.”

  “That’s possible, but I don’t talk about my work,” he said, but not nastily. His manner had become shy.

  After an awkward silence, he invited us into a room adjoining the studio. It was modestly furnished with a couch and some chairs. His work hung on the walls, and although not cozy, the room was, like, lived-in.

  “I understand from Bob Maynard you’re a pipe smoker,” Parma said to Virgil, and he nodded toward a double-tiered pipe rack on a table. Virgil went over and bent down in his myopic way to examine the pipes as if they were Neo-Sumerian figurines. Then Parma packed with tobacco and lit up a pipe, almost two feet long, unlike any I had ever seen. I asked him what it was, which drew a glance of approval from Virgil, like a proud father when his young daughter asks an intelligent question. Parma explained that this pipe was the Turkish Chibouk, consisting of a bell-shaped bowl of red clay, a stem of cherrywood along which traditionally were tied colored cords with tassels, and a tortoiseshell mouthpiece called the imaneh. He had traded a large painting for this Chibouk, which was an antique. He passed it over to Virgil, who handled it reverently. I felt I was in the presence of a sacred church relic.

  Then Virgil asked Parma about the pipe that Professor Maynard had given him.

  “Yes, that is too bad.” Parma finished his beer and crumpled the can with one quick squeeze of his hand. “It’s not here, it’s out in East Hampton. A beautiful Pear, birds-eye grain.”

  “Hell,” said Virgil.

  “In the summer I keep a place out there. To get away.” Nervously Parma drew his hand across his forehead. “I’m working up a new show, and that third wife of mine—well, she was my third—she’s giving me a helluva time.” He turned to me with a woeful little smile. “Altogether I have seven children to educate.” Then he lapsed into a kind of reverie, and I understood why he had never so much as given me a glance: he had had it with women. All that masculinity going to waste was a shame—but then, talented men aren’t always clever about women.

  “Mr. Parma?” Virgil began.

  “What?” Parma lurched forward a little, as if he had been roused from thinking of other things, which he certainly must have been—all those squabbling wives and the seven children and his next show, which had to be more of a success than his previous one or he would probably be dropped by the Dexter Gallery.

  “When you return to East Hampton, will that be soon?”

  “A day, two, three—” Nick Parma was looking more distracted by the moment.

  “Could you check that Pear for microfilm? And if there is any, would you be so kind
as to mail it to us?”

  “Oh, yes.” Parma’s eyes were glancing around the room as if he expected those ex-wives to spring at him from the woodwork. “Yes, of course. Yes.”

  Virgil gave him our address, and we prepared to leave. Passing through the studio on our way out, I said, looking at the painting on the easel, “I sure like this direction.”

  At the door, Virgil thanked him for the beers and his efforts in our behalf, and for an answer Parma ran his hand nervously through his black hair again.

  After we had climbed over the bodies at the bottom of the stairs. I turned and said to Virgil, “He won’t do it. He won’t even look in the pipe.”

  “Yes he will.”

  “He’ll forget,” I declared, thinking of the wives and the passel of kids and the poor critical reception of his last show.

  “He’ll look, and if anything’s in the Pear, he’ll send it along. You saw to that.”

  “Me?” I glanced at Virgil, who was grinning broadly. “You think he dug me? I don’t think so. He didn’t even look at me as a geometrical design—not even that.”

  “I agree. But he’ll answer us, I’m sure. You saw to that.”

  “Well, he did seem kind of impressed by my knowledge of Near Eastern Art.”

  “He’ll look inside that pipe and he’ll answer us—purely and simply out of a sense of gratitude.”

  “Gratitude for what?”

  “For your seeing his last show.”

  *

  That evening when I arrived at Eros, I was thinking that after all our efforts we hadn’t got very far. I mean, in the first place the idea was corny—working for justice in a world that had lost its values. If anyone understood how profoundly this country had lost its values, Virgil Jefferson did—a black historian; yet he would not give up his search for tiny bits of microfilm that might have some connection with the murder of a friend or that at least might vindicate the friend’s efforts to secure some minor document concerning a period of history that nobody really cared much about anymore. We had spent the afternoon with Mr. Jeremy Purdy and Mr. Nicholas Parma and we didn’t have any more information now than when we’d started, and yet when I left Virgil—he to work on the dissertation and I to serve booze—he had exclaimed, “We’re doing fine!” as if we had rolled a huge boulder up the mountain. What a man.