Answered Prayers Read Free Page B

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 wereliving 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 theway 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