Answered Prayers (3 page)

My name is P. B. Jones, and I’m of two minds—whether to tell you something about myself right now, or wait and weave the information into the text of the tale. I could just as well tell you nothing, or very little, for I consider myself a reporter in this matter, not a participant, at least not an important one. But maybe it’s easier to start with me.

As I say, I’m called P. B. Jones; I am either thirty-five or thirty-six: the reason for the uncertainty is that no one knows when I was born or who my parents were. All we know is that I was a baby abandoned in the balcony of a St. Louis vaudeville theater. This happened 20 January 1936. Catholic nuns raised me in an austere red-stone orphanage that dominated an embankment overlooking the Mississippi River.

I was a favorite of the nuns, for I was a bright kid and a beauty; they never realized how conniving I was, duplicitous, or how much I despised their drabness, their aroma: incense and dishwater, candles and creosote, white sweat. One of the sisters, Sister Martha, I rather liked, she taught English and was so convinced I had a gift for writing that I became convinced of it myself. All the same, when I left the orphanage, ran away, I didn’t leave her a note or ever communicate with her again: a typical sample of my numbed, opportunistic nature.

Hitchhiking, and with no particular destination in mind, I was picked up by a man driving a white Cadillac convertible. A burly guy with a broken nose and a flushed, freckled Irish complexion. Nobody you’d take for a queer. But he was. He asked where I was headed, and I just shrugged; he wanted to know how old I was—I said eighteen, though really I was three years younger. He grinned and said: “Well, I wouldn’t want to corrupt the morals of a minor.”

As if I
had
any morals.

Then he said, solemnly: “You’re a good-looking kid.” True: on the short side, five seven (eventually five eight), but sturdy and well-proportioned, with curly brown-blond hair, green-flecked brown eyes, and a face dramatically angular; to examine myself in a mirror was always a reassuring experience. So when Ned took his dive, he thought he was grabbing cherry. Ho ho! Starting at an early age, seven or eight or thereabouts, I’d run the gamut with many an older boy and several priests and also a handsome Negro gardener. In fact, I was a kind of Hershey Bar whore—there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for a nickel’s worth of chocolate.

Though I lived with him for several months, I can’t remember Ned’s last name. Ames? He was chief masseur at a big Miami Beach hotel—one of those ice-cream-color Hebrew hangouts with a French name. Ned taught me the trade, and after I left him I earned my living as a masseur at a succession of Miami Beach hotels. Also, I had a number of private clients, men and women I massaged and trained in figure and facial exercises—although facial exercises are a lot of crap; the only effective one is cocksucking. No joke, there’s nothing like it for firming the jawline.

With my assistance, Agnes Beerbaum improved her facial contours admirably. Mrs. Beerbaum was the widow of a Detroit dentist who had retired to Fort Lauderdale, where he promptly experienced a fatal coronary. She was not rich, but she had money—along with an ailing back. It was to alleviate these spinal spasms that I first entered her life, and remained in it long enough to accumulate, through gifts above my usual fee, over ten thousand dollars.

Now
that’s
when I should have moved to the country.

But I bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus that carried me to New York. I had one suitcase, and it contained very little—only
underwear, shirts, a bathroom kit, and numerous notebooks in which I had scribbled poems and a few short stories. I was eighteen, it was October, and I’ve always remembered the October glitter of Manhattan as my bus approached across the stinking New Jersey marshes. As Thomas Wolfe, a once-admired and now-forgotten idol, might have written: Oh, what promise those windows held!—cold and fiery in the rippling shine of a tumbling autumn sun.

Since then, I’ve fallen in love with many cities, but only an orgasm lasting an hour could surpass the bliss of my first year in New York. Unfortunately, I decided to marry.

Perhaps what I wanted in the way of a wife was the city itself, my happiness there, my sense of inevitable fame, fortune. Alas, what I married was a girl. This bloodless, fishbelly-pale amazon with roped yellow hair and egglike lilac eyes. She was a fellow student at Columbia University, where I had enrolled in a creative-writing class taught by Martha Foley, one of the founder/editors of the old magazine
Story
. What I liked about Hulga (yes, I know Flannery O’Connor named one of her heroines Hulga, but I’m not swiping; it’s simply coincidence) was that she never wearied of listening to me read my work aloud. Mostly, the content of my stories was the opposite of my character—that is, they were tender and
triste;
but Hulga thought they were beautiful, and her great lilac eyes always gratifyingly brimmed and trickled at the end of a reading.

Soon after we were married, I discovered there was a fine reason why her eyes had such a marvelous moronic serenity. She was a moron. Or damn near. Certainly she wasn’t playing with a full deck. Good old humorless hulking Hulga, yet so dainty and mincingly clean—housewifey. She hadn’t a clue how I really felt about her, not until Christmas, when her parents came to visit us: a pair of Swedish brutes from Minnesota, a mammoth twosome twice the size of their daughter. We were
living in a one-and-a-half-room apartment near Morningside Heights. Hulga had bought a sort of Rockefeller Center—type tree: it spread floor to ceiling and wall to wall—the damn thing was sucking the oxygen out of the air. And the fuss she made over it, the fortune she spent on this Woolworth’s shit! I happen to hate Christmas because, if you’ll pardon the tearjerker note, it always amounted to the year’s most depressing episode in my Missouri orphanage. So on Christmas Eve, minutes before Hulga’s parents were supposed to arrive for the Yuletide hoedown, I abruptly lost control: took the tree apart and piece by piece fed it out the window in a blaze of blown fuses and smashing bulbs—Hulga the whole while hollering like a half-slaughtered hog. (Attention, students of literature! Alliteration—have you noticed?—is my least vice.) Told her what I thought of her, too—and for once those eyes lost their idiot purity.

Presently, Mama and Papa appeared, the Minnesota giants: sounds like a homicidal hockey team, which is how they reacted. Hulga’s folks simply slammed me back and forth between them—and before I conked out, they had cracked five ribs, splintered a shinbone, and blackened both eyes. Then, apparently, the giants packed up their kid and headed home. I’ve never heard a word from Hulga, not in all the years that have gone by; but, so far as I know, we are still legally attached.

Are you familiar with the term “killer fruit”? It’s a certain kind of queer who has Freon refrigerating his bloodstream. Diaghilev, for example. J. Edgar Hoover. Hadrian. Not to compare him with those pedestal personages, but the fellow I’m thinking of is Turner Boatwright—Boaty, as his courtiers called him.

Mr. Boatwright was the fiction editor of a women’s fashion magazine that published “quality” writers. He came to my attention, or rather I came to his, when one day he spoke to our writing class. I was sitting in the front row, and I could tell, by the
way his chilly crotch-watching eyes kept gravitating toward me, what was spinning around in his pretty curly-grey head. Okay, but I decided he wasn’t going to get any bargain. After class, the students gathered around to meet him. Not me; I left without waiting to be introduced. A month passed, during which I polished the two stories of mine I considered best: “Suntan,” which was about beachboy whores in Miami Beach, and “Massage,” which concerned the humiliations of a dentist’s widow grovelingly in love with a teen-age masseur.

Manuscripts in hand, I went to call on Mr. Boatwright—without an appointment; I simply went to the offices of the magazine and asked the receptionist to tell Mr. Boatwright that one of Miss Foley’s students was there to see him. I was certain he would know which one. But when I was eventually escorted into his office, he pretended not to remember me. I wasn’t fooled.

The office was not unbusinesslike; it seemed a Victorian parlor. Mr. Boatwright was seated in a cane rocking chair beside a table draped with fringed shawls that served as a desk; another rocker was placed on the opposite side of the table. The editor, with a sleepy gesture meant to disguise cobra alertness, motioned me toward it (his own chair, as I later discovered, contained a little pillow with an embroidered inscription:
MOTHER
). Although it was a sizzling spring day, the window curtains, heavy velvet and of a hue I believe is called puce, were drawn; the only light came from a pair of student lamps, one with dark red shades, the other with green. An interesting place, Mr. Boatwright’s lair; clearly the management gave him great leeway.

“Well, Mr. Jones?”

I explained my errand, said I had been impressed by his lecture at Columbia, by the sincerity of his desire to assist young authors, and announced that I had brought two short stories that I wished to submit for his consideration.

He said, his voice scary with cute sarcasm: “And why did you choose to submit them in person? The customary method is by mail.”

I smiled, and my smile is an ingratiating proposition; indeed, it is usually construed as one. “I was afraid you would never read them. An unknown writer without an agent? I shouldn’t think too many such stories ever reach you.”

“They do if they have merit. My assistant, Miss Shaw, is an exceedingly able and perceptive reader. How old are you?”

“I’ll be twenty in August.”

“And you think you’re a genius?”

“I don’t know.” Which was untrue; I was certain I was. “That’s why I’m here. I’d like your opinion.”

“I’ll say this: you’re ambitious. Or is it just plain push? What are you, a yid?”

My reply was no particular credit to me; though I am relatively without self-pity (well, I wonder), I’ve never been above exploiting my background to achieve sympathetic advantage. “Possibly. I was raised in an orphanage. I never knew my parents.”

Nevertheless, the gentleman had knee-punched me with aching accuracy. He had my number; I was no longer so sure I had his. At the time I was immune to the mechanical vices—seldom smoked, never drank. But now, without permission, I selected a cigarette from a nearby tortoise-shell box; as I lighted it, all the matches in the matchbook exploded. A tiny bonfire erupted in my hand. I jumped up, wringing my hand and whimpering.

My host merely and coolly pointed at the fallen, still-flaming matches. He said: “Careful. Stamp that out. You’ll damage the carpet.” Then: “Come here. Give me your hand.”

His lips parted. Slowly his mouth absorbed my index finger, the one most scorched. He plunged the finger into the depths of
his mouth, almost withdrew, plunged again—like a huntsman drawing dangerous liquid from a snakebite. Stopping, he asked: “There. Is that better?”

The seesaw had upended; a transference of power had occurred, or so I was foolish enough to believe.

“Much; thank you.”

“Very well,” he said, rising to bolt the office door. “Now we shall continue the treatment.”

NO, IT WASN’T AS EASY
as that. Boaty was a hard fellow; if necessary, he would have paid for his pleasures, but he never would have published one of my stories. Of the original two I gave him, he said: “They’re not good. Ordinarily, I’d never encourage anyone with a talent as limited as yours. That is the cruelest thing anyone can do—to encourage someone to believe he has gifts he actually doesn’t possess. However, you do have a certain word sense. Feeling for characterization. Perhaps something can be made of it. If you’re willing to risk it, take the chance of ruining your life, I’ll help you. But I don’t recommend it.”

I wish I had listened to him. I wish that then and there I had moved to the country. But it was too late, for I had already started my journey to the Earth’s interior.

Am running out of paper. I think I’ll take a shower. And afterward I may move to the sixth floor.

I HAVE MOVED TO THE
sixth floor.

However, my window is flat against the next-door building; even if I did step over the sill, I’d only bump my head. We’re having a September heat wave, and my room is so small, so hot, that I have to leave my door open day and night, which is unfortunate
because, as in most Young Men’s Christian Associations, the corridors murmur with the slippered footfalls of libidinous Christians; if you leave your door open, it’s frequently understood as an invitation. Not from me, no sir.

The other day, when I started this account, I had no notion whether or not I’d continue it. However, I’ve just come from a drugstore, where I purchased a box of Blackwing pencils, a pencil sharpener, and a half-dozen thick copybooks. Anyway, I’ve nothing better to do. Except look for a job. Only, I don’t know what kind of work to look for—unless I went back to massage. I’m not fit for much anymore. And, to be honest, I keep thinking that maybe, if I change most of the names, I could publish this as a novel. Hell, I’ve nothing to lose; of course, a couple of people might try to kill me, but I’d consider that a favor.

AFTER I’D SUBMITTED MORE THAN
twenty stories, Boaty did buy one. He edited it to the bone and half rewrote it himself, but at least I was in print. “Many Thoughts of Morton,” by P. B. Jones. It was about a nun in love with a Negro gardener named Morton (the same gardener who had been in love with me). It attracted attention, and was reprinted in that year’s
Best American Short Stories;
more importantly, it was noticed by a distinguished friend of Boaty’s, Miss Alice Lee Langman.

Boaty owned a roomy old brownstone town house; it was far east in the upper Eighties. The interior was an exaggerated replica of his office, a crimson Victorian horsehair mélange: beaded curtains and stuffed owls frowning under glass bells. This brand of camp, now
démodé
, was amusingly uncommon in those days, and Boaty’s parlor was one of Manhattan’s most populated social centers.