A Woman Named Drown

by Padgett Powell

  “I have a year.”

  We discussed my research—his research—and I was surprisingly clear about where I’d left off, and we concurred that we should be able to determine the particular boron-lithium mechanic we sought well within a year and that I would go free with a signed degree.

  “Tunkie,” I said at the end, still incredulous that a Dr. Friedeman could become a fast-car teenager named Tunkie before my very eyes.

  “Time is a marvel,” he said, standing, concluding our intimacies. “I know full well you are enough of a scientist.” We were back to science. It was nice to have struck a gentleman’s agreement as we had in a world of spin accelerators and Fourier analyzers and computers called NERDS.

  So that is how I came finally to take notes again, and again notes of science in a blue-gridded engineering notebook, on a heavy slate lab bench, down which I sight a tiny army of test tubes in white polypropylene racks taking aliquots from an automatic pipette. It is a tiny induction into service: the stiff fellows at glassy attention taking their inoculations like the best of soldiers. I will march them into chromatographs, fire electrons at them, freeze them. Some will step back and some will step forward. Together we will answer a question about a structure so small the ink of this word could insulate it against the light of day for a thousand years.

  Titration (that is what the aliquots are about) is precisely the model for my conclusions about loss and gain. This came to me immediately after I talked to Friedeman and that afternoon set up a run. It is precisely a series of excesses and shortages that determines the resting point—I have been on a tour of titration, admiring the true titrators of life as I found them.

  I was in this rumination, deciding it was a bit forced to carry further, that it was better to conclude my investigations somewhat less specifically, after the fashion of, say, the Nose Chemist, when an extraordinary thing happened. Minnie, the building’s maid, came in and counted out change and asked if I’d go get her a bottle of wine.

  “Ain’t seen you in a time,” she said. “You been sick?”

  “No, Minnie. Took a trip.”

  “That’s nice.”

  I took her change and left for the wine. This was not unusual. Minnie—a black woman, but so light-skinned students debate her race—is a long story herself. Among the pleasures she affords folk, besides her speaking nicely and well to you as she sweeps under your very stool late at night, is that of stopping the nonsense you are about and sending you to the campus bar ostensibly to get her some wine. I am probably one of four or five trusted wine couriers. After her order, at this time of evening—after talking to Friedeman and setting up, it was late—I could expect to meet her on the roof for a drink.

  What is extraordinary is what happened in the bar. I saw a fellow student, alone, and joined him with my beer and Minnie’s bottle. He and I were peripherally acquainted, I did not know him well. He was known chiefly for his hair, which is red and wild, visible at a half mile—a hirsute monument to 1969. He is also known for his participation in a scandalous ménage à trois involving two other graduate students, and for his generally pleasant demeanor (he is sometimes referred to as the Pacifist). I sat down.

  We simply drank—Men at Science—after the initial greeting. He was watery in the eye; I concluded his pitcher of beer might not have been the first. As I finished my own mug, he refilled it, generously washing the table with suds. The spill floated a folded card on the table advertising a new product called Wine without Alcohol.

  “Wine without alcohol!” the Pacifist shouted. “That’s like—like women without sex!”

  Suddenly I knew him from somewhere, knew more about him than I thought. He was a Veteran! He was a drunk, academic, foot-stomping Veteran. As one would with the Veteran himself, I held my cards.

  I recalled once standing with him on a fourth-floor balcony watching students come and go, and we happened to witness his girl leaving campus with the other corner of the notorious triad. My man appeared to be the afternoon man. The other fellow, who resembles less a hippie than a young athletic coach, had her, as the mill had it, for the night. We stood on the balcony and watched Coach and the shared lover leave campus.

  “Looks rough,” I said.

  “You can say that again,” he said. He said it with such fidelity to its customary comic use that I nearly laughed. He was not about to laugh, though.

  Now, in the bar, I was sure his condition was owing to the Coach and the Devoted being home together. I did not dare broach it. In the noise of darts and jukebox and pizza orders he started telling me about doing acid.

  “I was in Matagorda, Texas, man. I dropped some acid and got in my tent and ate an apple. These crabs came up to the tent. I started feeding them pieces of apple. They ate the apple, man. They were huge. Claws like Japanese monster movies. It was wild.”

  “I bet.”

  “They’d run up, you know, grab the apple, and run away!” He laughed. Despite his momentary laugh, I still thought he looked as wrung out as the Veteran. “Wine without alcohol!” he yelled again, noticing the card as if for the first time.

  “No human sorrow,” he suddenly intoned, “ever stopped the world.”

  I looked at him. I was right, then, apparently, about his preoccupation, but I still did not know what to say. He poured me another beer.

  “Thanks.”

  “You need it.”

  “I need it?”

  “Man, it’s okay. The word’s out about—” He stopped. He meant Dr. Eminence in Norway.

  “That?” I said. It—she—truly felt a million years ago and a million miles away. “Shit.” I dismissed it all with a gesture which he smiled at, as if he thought me bluffing. I realized we had a bit more in common than I’d thought. We’d both hung up on bright schoolgirls, at the least. And to, it looked, no profit. The next thing is what stunned me.

  “You going to drink that?” he said, referring to Minnie’s bottle.

  “It’s for Minnie.”

  “Hey! Minnie is a quality person!”

  I could not respond. It was not simply that I had not impugned her in any way to provoke his defense, and it was not that I could not have agreed more with him and so felt doubly strange being accused of impugning her. It was that he was regarding Minnie, in his present lovelorn straits, exactly as I had come to regard Mary and Hazel and Wallace, and even my own mother, and Minnie indeed was one of them, and, indeed—it was too much—he was, it looked, on the brink of a plunge identical to my own. The events were duplicable. I could prove my results. The interlude had necessity, was not random, was not lunatic.

  “She’s a what?” I said.

  “She’s a quality person!” he shouted again, and I thought he was going to come over the table.

  I shouted at him, “You can say that again!” and started laughing, and he, after a minute, did, too.

  I left him there, no doubt in my mind that he was launched in his own series of titrations against and away from a certain sort of preoccupation.

  Minnie and her custodial partner, Earl, were on the roof when I got there. We sat on the parapet, where we could see Earl’s car parked in the vapor lighting of the loading dock. Earl was most careful of his car, which he had painted aerosol-can gold. It had the look, from where we were above it, of a huge, dull moth on the ground.

  “It’s all right, honey,” Minnie was saying to Earl, when nothing at all suggested that Earl was concerned. She held my arm then, as if to say further assistance would not be necessary. Earl looked at his car, wet-eyed, mumbling in his high, singing tones nothing anyone but Minnie can understand. He talks like a man with his tongue cut out, and yet every gesture—the whole demeanor—looks rational. No one has a clue as to what’s wrong with him, what happened.

  Minnie and I got into one of our discussions of bigotry, a frequent topic.

  “Mr. Harry Truman, I believe,” she said, “was a spigot, but at least a straight-up one. I say spigot because this is no world for name-calling.” />
  She extended her glass for wine. In the vapor light our teeth were already purple.

  I put the wine into a mound of gravel, attempting to insulate it: cooling wet green glass in gravel.

  “Entropy, Minnie. The wine has a bad case of entropy.” She will like new utterance, I thought,

  “I love entropy.”

  Earl was studying his furry car, a worried tune coming from him.

  I said to Minnie: “Minnie.”

  “Yeahyess,” she said.

  “Have you always swept floors?”

  “No, sir. I have not always swept floors.” She said this with a wistful ease that reminded me of Havana Carlisle—as if she were content with a cigar and a sunny street and a secret. “That,” she said, “is my prerogative.”

  “I know it is,” I said.

  She sat on the parapet, not inelegantly, with her legs crossed. The Carlisle connection was not idle—why did the reaction series put before me these landmark blacks, and why now what I took to be half-a-black? She was not unlike my mother in the scheme: she was perhaps an isomer, an identical compound in a different structure, to my mother. I thought this quite literally, trusting that it was not strictly a matter of the wine and my purple teeth.

  She was isomer to my mother: half black and totally prescient, and my mother, who’d been told she was, in the River Road scheme of things, equivalently only half white, was totally distracted. Earl came over to Minnie and faced her, moving to his own noise in a little rumba motion. I noticed the wine was low, and in the same instant I saw the Pacifist emerge from the shadows on the ground.

  “Get one of these,” I called to him. He looked up.

  “What?”

  “With alcohol.” I pointed to the bottle, which I held up. He saw Minnie. He turned abruptly back into the shadows. Impressed with the telegraphy of drunks, I turned to discover Minnie and Earl dancing.

  Beyond the notion of people with purple teeth dancing a cappella on a roof, the thing to see was Earl. What wasn’t coming out of his mouth so clearly was with complete brilliance and precision coming out of his feet. He was leading Minnie very strongly in a fast honky-tonk kind of swing, Minnie bandying about on the spins like Lucille Ball, Earl like a matador, not disturbing a speck of pea gravel. Minnie’s legs flew up for balance, her head back; Earl engineered the next turn, Teflon man. I had never seen a better dancer than Earl.

  It was a magical scene. They slowed down a bit. Minnie recovered some form and suggested not so much a slapstick Lucy as a proud, regal Lena Horne. Earl mumbled something very high to her and she said, “You’re welcome. Thank you, Earl,” and they parted.

  The Pacifist was on the roof. “What are y’all doing up here?”

  “Hey, sugar,” Minnie said, sitting back on the parapet.

  “Hello, Minnie,” the Pacifist said, rather formally, I thought, perhaps still defending her honor from before.

  Minnie extended her glass toward the new bottle, which the Pacifist and I went for.

  “Man, all the way down there you can tell you guys are titrating with the purple indicator,” the Pacifist said. It was parlance in the department to speak of drinking as titrating, and this Rit-dye wine—the only kind we could get on campus—as “the purple indicator.”

  “I thought that was tit rate,” Minnie said. “You boys is always tit rating everything.” I looked at her: it was hard to tell if she was joking.

  The Pacifist didn’t care. “We are!” he shouted, as overly loud as he’d been in the bar. “My girlfriends never have any tits.”

  “That’s all right, mine don’t, either,” Minnie said.

  This put the Pacifist into a knee slap. He came out of it teary-eyed. “That’s a good one, Minnie.”

  “I’ll tell you a good one,” Minnie said. The Pacifist slid down inside the parapet wall next to her in the attitude of a child at storytime. He was a truly unhappy dude.

  “Mandy Smith was with the ladies down at the Baptist Ladies’ Aid, you know,” Minnie said. “And she says, Girls, don’t tell Opal Brown about the bazaar because Opal Brown don’t have no class. She doesn’t know Opal Brown walk up behind her.

  “Opal Brown says, Say what? Opal Brown don’t have no class? Who bought the genuine simulated crushed-velvet carpet for the pastor to walk on? Opal Brown, that’s who. Who bought the dime-store expensive red glasses for the communion? Opal Brown, that’s who. No class? Sheeeit.”

  The Pacifist started laughing hysterically, sliding over onto the gravel, holding his sides. Before my very eyes I thought I saw the initial reaction in the commencement of his tour that would be identical to mine: when he could, he looked at Minnie with what I took to be sober awe. He was stunned, if I’ve got the entire thing right, to notice the pleasure afforded him by this most noncustodial of janitors (the second one in these series—James in mine, Minnie in his). She had startled him as I’d been startled by Mary and no-bio gins and flowers and billiards.

  Why did these wanderings—they were not Brownian meanders, I was convinced, looking at our purple-mouthed gang—seem to make use of older women early on, and why—I thought of Ebert-James-The Boys—blacks? And why, now, in Minnie, what appeared to be a person of both camps offering a powerful hybrid vigor? Perhaps it was having set up a hundred stiff titrations hours before and drawn a table to accommodate results, but I began to speculate then and there in a fashion altogether too rigorous for the Nose Chemist to approve.

  What my reaction series had come to, or brought me to, or made of me, I’m sure is better known at some considerable analytical remove from the way I will have to know my pipette doughboys. I am, perhaps, for example, just some odd precipitate that fell out of a larger event, not the principal product, not practically identifiable, not important. I knew, however, on the roof, that I had had drinks with Minnie before my trip, and the drinks now were entirely another affair. Before, I might have humored her—without condescension and with considerable honest pleasure taken in her company, but it was a humoring all the same. Now I was prepared to have her humor me: I was the one on the roof with the improbably high propensity to dalliance, the incalculable willingness to step sideways and backward before forward.

  I decided to call it the anti-actualization quotient. Looking at Earl and Minnie and the Pacifist and a campus full of shadows, the function defined itself as ambition, times self-centered custodial purpose, divided by one’s natural opportunities for going up in the world.

  People started to key out nicely. The Orphan, I decided, was the Low Quotient Standard and Ebert was the opposite Definitive Standard: his natural opportunities for going up so low that no matter what his ambition, his sense of self-preservation, his anti-actualization value would remain astronomically high.

  James is a peg lower (lower value equals higher actualization potential), having developed sufficient verbal skills to go up to a secure, ironic position of the deliberately idle, grandly titled factotum. Blacks in general, I thought, despite legislation and whatnot, sense such low values in their denominators, their true opportunities for worldly advance, that they automatically adjust to a reasonably low sense of self-importance to keep things, as it were, in balance (like their blood pressure); and their ambition, which can be high, becomes moot. (Sweeping floors, Minnie says, is her “prerogative.”)

  An opposite kind of case, with a nearly equal final quotient, is a Bobby Cherry: these good-old-boy gas-station dandies have high opportunities, and though their honest ambition is middling, their sense of self-importance is so extremely high that the entire quotient climbs into range with the blacks. It is these identical anti-actualization quotients that keep the tush-hogs hating the humbler blacks.

  And so one can go on. I wanted to rush from the roof and get some graph paper and begin keying people out, but Minnie and the Pacifist, talking as if at the late stages of a loud party, brought me to. The Pacifist was no longer morose. He was en route, in his series. Before Minnie said No class, he was as hooked on the parade of pert
tits and young brains as I was—these onward debutantes of science are the arbiters of low anti-actualization. His Shared Devoted and my Dr. Eminence give us headaches and heartaches trying to keep up. High ambitions, bloated importance, normal natural opportunity (higher if you figure affirmative action)—they balance into an egregious, self-aggrandizing machine that eats people up. These modern whippets are climbing the ladder of success busting the rungs out. They hurl us who would pursue them into courting widows while wearing the deceased’s pastels and falling in love with the maid.

  Minnie smoking on the parapet, the Pacifist sitting on the roof with his head not a foot from her lap, Earl becalmed into a swaying surveillance of his car, I shaped the gravel around the wine. We looked like a guerrilla camp.

  And so what is it, the older-women thing, that put the Pacifist and me into our revolts? Discovery of discoveries, looking at Minnie as I am, it comes to me: they have adjusted anti-actualization quotients like the blacks have. Thus, Minnie doubly is the queen bee that she is in this universe of practiced loss.

  Mary was like a ball glove handed to you in the seventh inning, used by someone else during the critical innings, and you get to play when the game is nearly won or lost with a trained glove that promises to be error-free. She was frayed, she was wrinkled, she had a cotton-candy softness, but all in all, she was a package of reticence and careless ease so correctly balanced I had never been so attracted to a person in my life.

  “Sheeeeeit,” the Pacifist suddenly said, going into a fit again. Minnie grabbed his hair and shook it gently and let go; the Pacifist looked up, around, to see what the pressure had been. I was pouring her another wine and he did not know she had touched him.

  Things were, at this moment, clear and not clear to me. Overall, I had taken a little downside sabbatical that had shown me something I would find it best to know only as the Nose Chemist knew his ketones: with Havana Carlisle in the back of my mind, I could inherit a two million net deal with enough grace that I would not worry about acquiring a $400 River Road plate, not haze a yardman—not much more, finally, was certain. Havana kept appearing to me: instead of cigar-waving down the main street of his town in Missouri, he was waving his cigar across my crushed-shell trucking lot. He was telling the company: Let’s raise our anti-actualization quotients to comfortable levels and go on about our business with these pipes.