Absence of the Hero Read online

“More meat?”

  “No.”

  “More celery?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want some more coffee?”

  “No.”

  “More peas?”

  “No.”

  “How about some bread?”

  “No, NO! Goddamn it, if I want anything, I’ll ask for it!”

  “Now what’s the matter with you?” yells my father. He throws his napkin across the table, slams his chair back, and rushes into the front room, his slippers knocking on the floor.

  “Chucky,” says my mother, “you have no idea how you hurt us. You have no idea how we try to please you. Your father loves you. You come here. You start George drinking. You are twenty-five years old. There is still time. Father wants to teach you to drive the car. No, you say. You don’t want a library card, a free movie. Just drink, drink, drink, and your eyes in your plate. Have you any money left?”

  “No.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Chucky, answer me, your mother.”

  Cacoethes Scribendi

  I heard the typewriter and rang the bell. He came to the door.

  “I heard your typewriter,” I said.

  He was a huge man, large-boned, tall, wide, somehow fortified. I glanced at his face and didn’t find it particularly striking. There was a little mustache, untrimmed, the hairs standing out separate and uneven; the forehead was flat and low on the large, oval head; there was a scar extending from the right side of a too-small mouth, and the eyes were not unusual.

  His writing was mostly a tautology of the popular mode, though sometimes he worked with abstraction, and because the others weren’t doing it, it did give his stories a clean, fresh ring, a ring, I thought sometimes a little too valiant with experimental pageantry. But what the devil, he was trying.

  I followed the big shoulders and head into the little house. The front rooms were dark and as I followed him to the back, we passed a red-haired woman stretched out on a couch. I judged her to be his wife, but he plunged ahead without an introduction. I smiled down at the lady and said Hello. She smiled back and said Hello. Her eyes came up out of the dark, clearly amused, and I liked her immediately.

  We pushed ahead, past a swinging door and into the kitchen. He motioned a big hand at a miniature yellow table: “Sit down. I’ll make some coffee.”

  The lights were uncomfortably bright, and I felt all unveiled in my pressed suit, clean shirt, tight and polished shoes. His shirt was open at the throat and he wore grey, musty pants. On the table was a typewriter, sheet inserted, partially done up in small, very black type. Other sheets were stacked to one side, and there were pretzels, a bulging pile of them, in a high, white bowl. I couldn’t help thinking that I had been invited to a ham dinner, but I was somehow relieved that it wasn’t so.

  Against the back wall of the kitchen was a homemade closet-like affair without a door and strung across with shelves. It was well-stacked with those writer’s magazines that give the markets and other to-do of literary journalism. They were placed neatly even, according to size, and no doubt in chronological order. From this shelf in the kitchen, and other hints, I had my open book on the suzerain of the little house.

  The coffee was set up and he dropped down across from me, behind his typewriter. He looked half-ritually at his sheet a moment, the eyes becoming round, dog round; the little glitter funneled to his reading. Then the spherical head came up.

  “Have a pretzel,” he said.

  I reached to the high, white bowl, sensing he was going to launch an analytical look, so I let him have full sway. I came back with my pretzel and bit off half of it.

  “I thought you were a younger man,” he said.

  “I’m twenty-five,” I answered, “but I’ve led a hard life.”

  “Still, you look the way I thought you would. I can always tell the way you fellows will look.”

  I knew what he meant: darkly sophisticated and strung up on a rather sharp edge. I stood up, took off my coat, threw it over a chair and loosened my tie. I would have taken off my shirt, too, but I wasn’t wearing an undershirt. I sat down and took another pretzel. The coffee began to boil.

  “Say, where’s the bathroom?” I asked. He gave me directions, and I set out. It was a surprisingly large bathroom for such a little hut . . . probably a Russian architect or an acephalous Irishman . . . but I went ahead with good intentions. I heard a sound and looked around: the door had opened a notch and a big hand was sticking through the notch with a towel. I took the towel from the hand. “Thanks,” I said. There was no answer. The big hand withdrew and the door closed.

  When I returned, the coffee was ready, and he suggested that we go to the bedroom. We picked up our cups and walked carefully so the coffee wouldn’t spill. There wasn’t a table in the room, but we went over to a desk. He held his saucer waist-high, lifted the cup, dipped the oval head, the vagrant yellow mustache, and sipped. Then he put his cup down on the desk and left the room.

  There were clippings and photographs all over the walls. On the floor was a wooden box filled with empty brown envelopes, written upon, the stamps cancelled, the brass clips twisted away. On the desk was a paper book. There was a pencil drawing on the cover, not exceptional, and the book was entitled The Collected Stories of K________ M________. I ran a thumb through the typewritten pages, then pushed the book away. I felt close in the room, as if I were being examined for assassination.

  He came back with his high, white bowl of fourscore pretzels and set them before me. I obliged and sipped at my coffee. He stood in the center of the room.

  “You know who that is, don’t you?” He was pointing to a magazine clipping, a photograph of somebody, pinned to the wall. I left the desk to examine the clipping.

  It was a woman, looking diacritic, argute, behind thick-rimmed glasses. She looked like a teacher of upper algebra.

  “Who is it?”

  “Read underneath.”

  Martha Foley, it said.

  I went back to the desk, sat down, and ate another pretzel.

  “I didn’t make it this year,” he said. “I think I’ll make it next year, though. She was lucky to get a book out this year . . . moving . . . she lost some of her things. I had to send her two extra copies of the magazine . . . the one with your story in it. I have letters from her. Do you want to see them?”

  “No, it’s all right. . . . Look, let’s go catch a drink.”

  “I don’t drink,” he said.

  “How about a beer?”

  I heard him rumbling about in the closet, and turning in the swivel chair, I saw his buttocks working in the musty grey pants as he bent over looking for something. Perhaps a bottle of wine?

  I got up and went to the window. I saw a grassless backyard surrounded by a profusion of lots. Well, he was alone, at any rate. There was a tire back there, an incinerator, a box of cans. It was all I could make out in the moonlight, and it was enough.

  He came out of the closet with a paper shoebox. He stood next to me and lifted the lid. For the first time, he smiled at me, at last coming out of his hoop of seriousness, and I felt warm and glad. His faced looked so much more honest when he smiled; the small mouth widened and the scar pulled just a little on the chin.

  “Letters,” he said.

  I looked down into the shoebox. He withdrew one, then another. “Accent, Circle, all of them. You know, ones that just missed. They write you about them.”

  I made some comment and he put the lid back on the shoebox and returned it to the closet. He came out of the closet looking grave again. I was back at the desk, at the high, white bowl. He stood there a moment, silent, looking very huge, the zebu.

  “I’ve decided,” he said, “that I can’t use you as an associate editor. You may not believe in such things—I doubt if you do—but sometimes God speaks to me, and last night I had a vision, and I was told you wouldn’t do.”

  I left soon after that, and he insisted on driving me the two miles to t
he streetcar line, saying that the buses probably didn’t run out there at that time of night, and if they did, it was probably at hour intervals.

  I stood out on the porch with the red-haired lady who was probably his wife, as he went back to the garage to get the car.

  “He’s really a nice fellow,” I said.

  She stood there, her arms folded, with that beautiful, clearly amused smile. It was then that I remembered it was Sunday night and she had been alone for hours.

  “We’ve been married almost twenty-five years.”

  “Yes?”

  “And it was all right until this writing thing started.”

  The car came down the drive backwards . . . about a 1928 model; thick steel body and enormous headlights, like the eyes of a monster, a great steel monster refusing to die.

  He opened the car door and looked out at me. The red-haired woman opened the door of the little house.

  “Goodbye,” I said.

  “Goodbye,” she answered.

  He drove toward the streetcar terminal and we discussed Sherwood Anderson. Arriving, we shook hands, said the parting words, and he helped me with the door handle. I got out. The monster chugged once, almost stopped, and then charged off into the night. . . .

  I am in another town now, but he has written me. It was a short note, typewritten on a piece of small yellow paper. I understand he has given up abstraction. He says his job there is done. He has agents in New York and London. Also, he writes, he has given up the magazine to devote himself fully to his art.

  The Rapist’s Story

  I never knew I’d be one.

  And I still don’t feel like one. Or maybe I do. I don’t know how they feel. I only know how I feel.

  You know, I’d read about them in the newspapers now and then, and that was it.

  I’d get to thinking, for just a minute, now why in the hell would a guy do anything like that? There’s so much of it walking around.

  But I never tied myself in with it at all.

  I guess that’s the way it is: one minute you are walking around just being a person and then all of a sudden you, yourself, are accused of being a rapist, an attacker, a ravisher, and people everywhere are opening up newspapers and reading about you.

  And somebody’s thinking, now why in the hell would a guy (meaning me, this time) do anything like that?

  There’s so much of it walking around.

  I guess they just figure that a rapist is some guy who has been running around peeking into windows with a bunch of dirty pictures in his pants pocket. Then he gets some kind of chance he has always been waiting for, and he goes ahead with the rape.

  That’s what I thought.

  Now, I only know myself.

  Well, all this talk is not telling the story of how I got into this jam.

  I don’t know exactly how to begin. If you just list down what happened and what you did, it doesn’t come out right. By that, I mean the question and answer sort of thing that goes on in courts. It isn’t right. They make you wrong. They just add up a set of question and answer figures and you flunk out on the total. It’s too automatic.

  Hell, they ought to let a man lean back in court and explain everything at his leisure, if he is able to.

  You know as well as I do, there is all that stiffness, and the judge, and the look of the place. You sit there just a minute or two—not even that, maybe 30 seconds—and you can feel where your shoelaces are tied across your feet and the way your collar runs around your neck.

  You can’t breathe right and are nervous as hell.

  And why?

  Because you know that justice has nothing to do with it. Maybe you’ll see a couple of guys marching around with paper in their hands. They are nervous too. Even the judge is nervous, even though he tries not to be and goes through with it every day.

  Some of them even try to smile and joke a little, especially in cases of minor concern. Those, I feel most sorry for, even if I am the case of minor concern.

  Yes, I’ll have to admit I’ve been in plenty of courts.

  But mostly only on drunk and vag raps.

  But listen, what I’m getting at is that there is nothing you can say, don’t you see?

  You were drunk?—O.K., guilty.

  You were a vag?—also, O.K., guilty.

  They don’t ask you why you were drunk or why you were a vag. A man gets drunk for a damn good reason and a man is a vag for a damn good reason. There’s nothing “guilty” about it.

  No more than being guilty because you’ve got brown hair or 8 fingers and two thumbs.

  O.K., they say I’m a rapist.

  An attacker.

  A ravisher.

  In fact, they’ve got me up for two counts of rape, child molestation, breaking and entering and everything else.

  Well . . . as they say. . . . I’ll begin at the beginning.

  The whole mess started like this: I was in the cellar picking up the old cardboard Mrs. Weber (she is the woman I am wrongfully accused of raping) said I could have.

  I knew where I could sell it for a little money, maybe for a little wine—which was mostly what a little money meant, anyhow.

  I saw the cardboard one time when the cellar door was open and I was walking down the alley.

  One time later when I saw Mrs. Weber (the woman who I am accused of ravishing) I asked her if I could have this cardboard that was laying around unused in her cellar.

  She said, “O.K., Jerry boy, anytime you want it, it’s O.K. with me. It’s not doing me any good the way it is.”

  Mrs. Weber said it just like that, without even hesitating.

  It took a lot of nerve to ask her. You see, I am pretty nervous from drinking and run down from living in that shack on the lot. I’m all alone and do a lot of thinking. All this thinking has sort of pressed into my mind and I’m not relaxed anymore. I feel so dirty; my clothing is old and torn.

  I don’t feel like I used to some years back. I’m only 32 now but I feel like some sort of animal outcast.

  Christ, it seems not like too long ago when I was going to high school in a clean blue sweater, carrying books on geometry and algebra, economics, civics, and all those things.

  I sort of thought of that when I asked Mrs. Weber for the cardboard and it helped a little. She was a big woman, a clean, big woman just this side of being fat. She had on a different dress every day, bright new colors, and she made me think of soap suds and soft, cool things.

  I thought of when I had been married, of the four years with Kay, the various apartments, the lousy factory jobs.

  Those factories got me down and I began hitting the bottle at night—at first now and then, and after a while, most of the time.

  I lost job after job and then I lost Kay, and I thought of it all as I asked Mrs. Weber for the cardboard.

  I hadn’t always been a wino and a vag.

  As Mrs. Weber walked away I looked at the backs of her legs, the sunshine hugging the nylons. Her arms, and the hair like something to make you sing.

  Don’t get me wrong. I know what I’m accused of. But I’m honest, and also I think I’m innocent of this rape charge, and I know I’m getting this mixed up but I’m trying to get it down so you can see what I mean. I don’t want to miss out on anything.

  A rapist, that’s what they call me.

  After Mrs. Weber went into the house, I looked down on my dirty and stained hands.

  The neighborhood was used to me in my paper shack, a little sorry for me and a little amused with me.

  But I was harmless.

  I am harmless.

  I’m no rapist, on the bible or anything you want.

  I wouldn’t dare touch Mrs. Weber—she was so far above me, such a different creature entirely, that the thought neither occurred to her or to me or to anybody else.

  It was impossible. . . .

  Well, one day I was moseying around and I noticed the cellar door open. I had a little hangover of a sort and nothing to drink, and I thought
, well, might as well be doing something, might help me forget my sorrows. It was one of those cloudy days when it looked like rain but it never did and you almost went crazy waiting for it but it just hung there and your mind kept saying, well, come on, come on, rain, but it never did. It just hung there.

  I went down there and found an electric light. Click, it went on, and it stank the cellar-stink down there. It made you think of wet gunnysacks and spiders or say a human arm buried somewhere in the mud, a human arm with some of the sleeve around it, and if you lifted it out of the mud, a bunch of water bugs would run up and down its side, scurrying past each other in direct line paths, with now and then a bug or two shooting out of the constellation.

  Constellation!

  You didn’t know I knew a word like that! You see, I am not just an ordinary vag. It’s just that the grape has me down.

  Well, anyhow, the cardboard was very wet and I figured I wouldn’t get anything for it at all, but I decided to drag it all up out of there because maybe Mrs. Weber would pay me just to get rid of a mess like that.

  I was afraid of spiders, though. I have always been afraid of spiders. It’s a funny thing with me. I’ve always been afraid of them and hated them. When I see a spider with a fly in the web, and the spider moving about swiftly, weaving like something mad and evil and dark, that movement there—I can’t explain it. Oh God, I’m getting off the track. I am accused of this rape. I’m accused of raping a ten-year-old girl and I am accused of raping her mother, and here I am talking about spiders.

  It all began in that cellar with the cardboard. You’ll just have to believe me. I didn’t know that Mrs. Weber’s little girl was down there in the cellar with me. I didn’t know until she spoke. When she did, I was so scared I jumped up into the air like a sand flea.

  “What’re you doing down here in this cellar?” I asked her right away. I could make out a red dress and white bloomers. As I said, she was about nine or ten years old. She was just like her mother: clean and plump, a real little lady, an apple dumpling. But I was scared of her almost like I was scared of her mother, but I was more scared not to act like an adult, and since I didn’t know much about little girls, I tried to act like an adult to sort of fool her, you see.