Tales of Desire Page 5

  There the masseur walked out on a lonely pier and dropped his burden under the lake’s quiet surface.

  As the giant turned homeward, he mused on his satisfaction.

  Yes, it is perfect, he thought, it is now completed!

  Then in the sack, in which he had carried the bones, he dropped his belongings, a neat blue suit to conceal his dangerous body, some buttons of pearl and a picture of Anthony Burns as a child of seven.

  He moved to another city, obtained employment once more as an expert masseur. And there in a white-curtained place, serenely conscious of fate bringing toward him another, to suffer atonement as it had been suffered by Burns, he stood impassively waiting inside a milky white door for the next to arrive.

  And meantime, slowly, with barely a thought of so doing, the earth’s whole population twisted and writhed beneath the manipulation of night’s black fingers and the white ones of day with skeletons splintered and flesh reduced to pulp, as out of this unlikely problem, the answer, perfection, was slowly evolved through torture.

  APRIL 1946 [PUB. 1948]

  Hard Candy

  ONCE UPON A TIME in a southern seaport of America there was a seventy-year-old retired merchant named Mr. Krupper, a man of gross and unattractive appearance and with no close family connections. He had been the owner of a small sweetshop, which he had sold out years before to a distant and much younger cousin with whose parents, no longer living, he had emigrated to America fifty-some years ago. But Mr. Krupper had not altogether relinquished his hold on the shop and this was a matter of grave dissatisfaction to the distant cousin and his wife and their twelve-year-old daughter, whom Mr. Krupper, with an old man’s interminable affection for a worn-out joke, still invariably addressed and referred to as “The Complete Little Citizen of the World,” a title invented for her by the cousin himself when she was a child of five and when her trend to obesity was not so serious a matter as it now appeared. Now it sounded like a malicious jibe to the cousins, although Mr. Krupper always said it with a benevolent air, “How is the complete little citizen of the world today?” as he gave her a quick little pat on the cheek or the shoulder, and the child would answer, “Drop dead!” which the old man never heard, for his high blood pressure gave him a continual singing in the ears which drowned out all remarks that were not shouted at him. At least he seemed not to hear it, but one could not be sure about Mr. Krupper. The degree of his simplicity was hard to determine.

  Sick old people live at varying distances from the world. Sometimes they seem to be a thousand miles out on some invisible sea with the sails set in an opposite direction, and nothing on shore seems to reach them, but then, at another time, the slightest gesture or faintest whisper will reach them. But dislike and even hatred seems to be something to which they develop a lack of sensibility with age. It seems to come as naturally as the coarsening of the skin itself. And Mr. Krupper showed no sign of being aware of how deeply his cousins detested his morning calls at the shop. The family of three would retire to the rooms behind the shop when they saw him coming, unless they happened to be detained by customers, but the old man would wait patiently until one of them was forced to reappear. “Don’t hurry, I have got nothing but time,” he used to say. He never left without scooping up a fistful of hard candies which he kept in a paper bag in his pocket. This was the little custom which the cousins found most exasperating of all, but they could do nothing about it.

  It was this way: the little shop had maintained itself so poorly since the cousins took over that they had never been able to produce more than the interest on the final payment that was due to Mr. Krupper. So they were forced to permit his depredations. Once the cousin, the male one, sourly remarked that Mr. Krupper must have a very fine set of teeth for a man of his years if he could eat so much hard candy, and the old man had replied that he didn’t eat it himself. “Who does?” inquired the cousin, and the old man said, with a yellow-toothed grin, “The birds!” The cousins had never seen the old man eat a piece of the candy. Sometimes it accumulated in the paper bag till it swelled out of his pocket like a great tumor, and then other times it would be mysteriously depleted, flattened out, barely visible under the shiny blue flap of the pocket, and then the cousin would say to his wife or daughter, “It looks like the birds were hungry.” These ominous and angry little jests had been continuing almost without variation over a very long time. The magnitude of the cousins’ dislike for the old man was as difficult to determine as the degree of the old man’s insensibility to it. After all, it was based on nothing important, two or three cents’ worth of hard candies a day and a few little apparently innocent exchanges of words among them, but it had been going on so long, for so many years. The cousins were not imaginative people, not even sufficiently so to complain to themselves about the tepid and colorless regularity of their lives and the heartbreaking fruitlessness of their dull will to go on and do well and keep going, and the little girl blowing up like a rubber toy, continually, senselessly and sadly popping the sweets in her mouth, not even knowing that she was doing it, crying sadly when told that she had to stop it, insisting quite truthfully that she didn’t know she had done it, and five minutes later, doing it again, getting her fat hands slapped and crying again but not remembering later, already fatter than either of her fat parents and developing gross, unladylike habits, such as belching and waiting on customers with a running nose and being called Fatty at school and coming home crying about it. All of these things could easily be associated in some way with the inescapable morning calls of old Mr. Krupper, and all of these little sorrows and resentments could conveniently adopt the old man as their incarnate image, which they did …

  In the course of this story, and very soon now, it will be necessary to make some disclosures about Mr. Krupper of a nature too coarse to be dealt with very directly in a work of such brevity. The grossly naturalistic details of a life, contained in the enormously wide context of that life, are softened and qualified by it, but when you attempt to set those details down in a tale, some measure of obscurity or indirection is called for to provide the same, or even approximate, softening effect that existence in time gives to those gross elements in the life itself. When I say that there was a certain mystery in the life of Mr. Krupper, I am beginning to approach those things in the only way possible without a head-on violence that would disgust and destroy and which would actually falsify the story.

  To have hatred and contempt for a person, as the cousins had for old Mr. Krupper, calls for the assumption that you know practically everything of any significance about him. If you admit that he is a mystery, you admit that the hostility may be unjust. So the cousins failed to see anything mysterious about the old man and his existence. Sometimes the male cousin or his wife would follow him to the door when he went out of the shop, they would stand at the door and stare after him as he shuffled along the block, usually with one hand clasped over the pocket containing the bag of hard candies as if it were a bird that might spring out again, but it was not curiosity about him, it was not interested speculation concerning the old man’s goings and comings that motivated their stares at his departing back, it was only the sort of look that you turn to give a rock on which you have stubbed your toe, a senselessly vicious look turned upon an insensibly malign object. There was not room in the doorway for both of the grown cousins, fat as they were, to stare after him at once. The one that got there first was the one that stared after him and the one that uttered the “faugh” of disgust as he finally disappeared from view, a “faugh” as disgusted as if they had penetrated to the very core of those mysteries about him which we are approaching by cautious indirection. The other one of the cousins, the one that had failed to achieve first place at the door, would be standing close behind but with a blocked vision, and the old man’s progress down the street and his eventual turning would be a vicarious spectacle enjoyed, or rather detested, only through the commentary provided by the cousin in the favored position. Naturally there was no
t much to comment upon. An old man’s progress down a city block is not eventful. Sometimes the one in the door would say, He has picked up something on the sidewalk. The other one would answer. Faugh! What?—momentarily alarmed that it might have been something of value, gratified to learn that the old man had dropped it again some paces beyond. Or the reporter would say, He is looking into a window! Which one? The haberdashery window! Faugh! He’ll never buy nothing … But the comments would always end with the announcement that he had crossed the street to the small public square in which Mr. Krupper seemed to spend all his mornings after the call at the sweetshop. The comments and the stares and the faughs of disgust betrayed no real interest or curiosity or speculation about him, only the fiercely senseless attention given to something acknowledged to have no mysteries whatsoever …

  For that matter, it would be hard for anybody to discover, from outside observation not carried to the point of actual sleuthing, what it was that gave Mr. Krupper the certain air he had of being engaged in something far more momentous than the ordinary meanderings of an old man retired from business and without close family ties. To notice something you would have to be looking for something, and even then a morning might pass or part of an afternoon or even sometimes a whole day without anything meeting your observation that would strike you as a notable difference. Yes, he was like almost any other old man of the sort that you see stooping painfully over to collect the scattering pages of an abandoned newspaper or shuffling out of a public lavatory with fingers fumbling at buttons or loitering upon a corner as if for a while undecided which way to turn. Unattached and aimless, these old men are always infatuated with little certainties and regularities such as those that ordered the life of Mr. Krupper as seen from outside. Habit is living. Anything unexpected reminds them of death. They will stand for half an hour staring fiercely at an occupied bench rather than take one which is empty but which is not familiar and therefore seems insecure to them, the sort of a cold bench on which the heart might flutter and stop or the bowels suddenly loosen a hot flow of blood. These old men are always picking little things up and are very hesitant about putting anything down, even if it is something quite worthless which they had picked up only a moment before out of simple lack of attention. They usually have on a hat, and in the South, it is usually a very old white one turned yellow as their teeth or gray as their cracked fingernails and stubbly beards. And they have a way of removing this hat now and then with a gesture that looks like a deferential salute, as if some great invisible lady had passed before them and given them a slight bow of recognition; and then, a few moments later, when the faint breeze has tickled and tousled their scalps a bit, the hat goes back on, more slowly and carefully than it had been removed; and then they gently change their position on the bench, always first curving their fingers tenderly under the ransacked home of their gender. Sighs and grunts are their language with themselves, speaking always of a weariness and a dull confusion, either alleviated by some little change or momentarily aggravated by it. Ordinarily there is no more mystery in their lives than there is in a gray dollar-watch which is almost consumed by the moments that it has ticked off. They are the nice old men, the sweet old men and the clean old men of the world. But our old man, Mr. Krupper, is a bird of a different feather, and it is now time, in fact it is probably already past time, to follow him further than the public square into which he turned when the cousins no longer could watch him. It is necessary to advance the hour of the day, to skip past the morning and the early afternoon, spent in the public square and the streets of that vicinity, and it is necessary to follow Mr. Krupper by streetcar into another section of the city.

  No sooner has he got upon this streetcar than Mr. Krupper undergoes a certain alteration, not too subtle to betray some outward signals: for he sits in the streetcar with an air of alertness that he did not have on the bench in the public square, he sits more erect and his various little gestures, fishing in his pocket for something, shifting about on the dirty blond straw bench, changing the level of the window shade, are all executed with greater liveliness and precision, as if they were the motions of a much younger man. Anticipation does that, and we would notice that about him, that mysterious attitude of expectancy, very slightly but noticeably increasing as the car whines along to the other part of the city. And we might even notice him beginning to color faintly as he prepares to ring the bell and rise from his seat a block in advance of the stop at which he descends. When he descends it is with all the painful, wheezing concentration of an inexpert climber following a rope down the side of an Alp, and his muttered thanks is too low to be audible as he sets foot to pavement. This he does, finally, with a vast sigh, an almost cosmic respiration, and he lifts his eyes well above the level of the roof-tops without appearing to look into the sky, a purely mechanical elevation that might once have had meaning, a salute to rational Providence which is supposed to be situated somewhere above the level of the roof-tops, if anywhere at all. And now Mr. Krupper has arrived within a block of where he is actually going and which is the place where the mysteries of his nature are to be made unpleasantly manifest to us. For some reason, a silly, squeamish kind of dissimulation, Mr. Krupper prefers to walk the last block to his destination rather than descend from the streetcar immediately before it. As he walks, and still a little before we know where he is going, we notice him making various anxious little preparations and adjustments. First he pats the bag of hard candies. Then he reaches into the opposite pocket of his jacket and pulls out a handful of quarters, counts them, makes sure there are exactly eight, and drops them back in the pocket. He then removes from the breast pocket of the jacket, from behind a protruding white handkerchief, always the whitest thing in his possession, a pair of dark-lensed glasses, lenses so dark that the eyes are not visible behind them. He puts these on. And now for the first time he seemingly dares to look directly toward the place that attracts him, and if we follow his glance we see that it is nothing less apparently innocent than an old theater building called the Joy Rio.

  So that much of the mystery is dissolved, and it is nothing more ostensibly remarkable than the little clocklike regularity of going three times a week, on Monday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons at about half past four, to a certain third-rate cinema situated near the water front and known as the Joy Rio. And if we followed Mr. Krupper only as far as the door of that cinema, nothing of an esoteric nature would be noticeable, unless you thought it peculiar that he should go three times a week to a program changed only on Mondays or that he never paused to inspect the outside posters in that gradual, reflective manner of most old men who make a habit of going to the movies but went directly up to the ticket window, or that even before he crossed the street to the block on which the cinema was located, he not only put on the secretive-looking glasses but accelerated his pace as if he were urged along by a bitter wind that nipped particularly at the back of the old man’s neck. But naturally we are not going to follow him only that far, we are going to follow him past the ticket window and into the interior of the theater. And right away, as soon as we have made that entrance, a premonition of something out of the ordinary is forced upon us. For the Joy Rio is not, by any means, an ordinary theater. It is the ghost of a once elegant house where plays and operas were performed long ago. But the building does not exist within the geographic limits of that part of the city which is regarded as having an historical value. Its decline into squalor, its conversion into a third-rate cinema, has not been particularly annotated by a sentimental press or public. Actually it is only when the lights are brought on, for a brief interval between shows or at their conclusion, that the place is distinguishable from any other cheap movie house. And then it is only distinguishable by looking upwards. Looking upwards you see that it contains not only the usual orchestra and balcony sections but two tiers of boxes extending in horseshoe design from one side of the proscenium to the other, but the faded gilt, the terribly abused red damask of these upper reaches of the
Joy Rio never bloom into sufficient light to make a strong impression from the downstairs. You have to follow Mr. Krupper up the great marble staircase that still rises beyond the balcony level before you really begin to explore the physical mysteries of the place. And that, of course, is what we are going to do.

  That is what we are going to do, but first we are going to orientate ourselves a little more specifically in time, for although these visits of Mr. Krupper to the Joy Rio are events of almost timeless repetition, our story is the narrative of one particular time and involving another individual, both of which must first be established, together, before we resume the company of Mr. Krupper.

  We come, then, to a certain afternoon when a shadowy youth who may as well remain nameless has come into the Joy Rio without any knowledge of its peculiar character and for no other reason than to catch a few hours’ sleep, for he is a stranger in the city who does not have the price of a hotel bedroom and who is in terror of being picked up for vagrancy and set to work for the city at no pay and a poor diet. He is very sleepy, so sleepy that his motions are more instinctive than conscious. The film showing that afternoon at the Joy Rio is an epic of the western ranges, full of loud voices and gunplay, so the boy turns as far away from the noisy and brilliant screen as the geography of the Joy Rio will allow him. He climbs the stairs to the first gallery. It is dark up there, but still noisy; so he continues his ascent, only faintly surprised to find that it is possible to do so. The darkness increases as he approaches the second level and the clamor of the screen is more than correspondingly reduced. In the gloom, as he makes a turn of the stairs, he passes what seems for a moment to be, almost believably, a naked female figure. He pauses there long enough to find out that it is only a piece of life-size statuary, cold to the fingers, and disappointingly hard in the places where he fondly touches it, a nymph made of cobwebbed stone in a niche at the turn of the stairs. He goes on up, and sleep is already descending on him, a black, fuzzy blanket, by the time he has wandered blindly into that one of the row of boxes which is to be occupied also, in a few minutes, by the old man whose mysteries are the sad ones of the Joy Rio …