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“Is this true, Brice?” Kent said after a while in the midst of
an unparalleled joy. “Are you sure you want to be with me?”
Brice held his uncle in his desperate embrace, and kissed
him almost brutally on the mouth.
“I said you had dried all my tears,” Brice told him. He
kissed his uncle again and again, and his hand pressed against
the older man’s thigh.
“I hope in the morning I will find you against my heart and
it will not be just a thing I felt in slumber,” Kent said.
Purdy’s language is stilted and archaic, almost biblical. His char-
acters talk in awkward clichés: drying my tears, waking to find
you. And it all strikes me to the heart. Clichés here are the ex-
pression of inexpressive people, of people trying to reach the
depths of what they’re feeling, often for the first time. Paradox-
ically, the use of cliché also holds the characters at a distance
from us by short-circuiting the very idea of psychologically re-
alistic motivation: people do these things for the reasons that
people have always done these things. Purdy doesn’t push be-
yond that mystery.
The mystery of motivation supplies the title to the most lac-
erating of the non-gay stories, “Why Can’t They Tell You
Why?,” about a boy and his widowed mother, this one the ab-
solute inverse of the mother in “Rapture.” It begins, “Paul knew
nearly nothing of his father until he found the box of photo-
graphs on the backstairs.” This could be a story about claiming
a patrimony, but that would be too easy, too comfortable. Paul
obsessively, and secretly, looks at the photographs, to the point
of not going to school for several months. The mother, Ethel, de-
mands to know why he looks at them. This is the mystery, the
“Why” of the title, but just as mysterious is the sadistic rage be-
hind Ethel’s demand to know:
She took hold of his hair and jerked him by it gently, as
though this was a kind of caress she sometimes gave him.
“If you don’t tell Ethel why you look at the photographs
all the time, we’ll have to send you to the mental hospital with
the bars.
“I don’t know why I look at them, dear Ethel,” he said now
in a very feeble but wildly tense voice, and he began petting the
fur on her houseslippers.
This is grotesque—the gentle hair jerk that is like a caress, the
mental hospital “with the bars,” petting the houseslippers, the
awkward formality of “dear Ethel”—but it descends further, to
the final image of the boy: “He had crouched on the floor and,
bending his stomach over the boxes, hissed at her, so that she
stopped short, not seeing any way to get at him, seeing no way
to bring him back, while from his mouth black thick strings of
something slipped out, as though he had spewed out the heart of
his grief.” Something primal and horrible is laid bare here, made
more so by Purdy’s refusal to give us the escape valve of com-
prehensible motivations for the mother or the son.
A less brutal but even murkier battle occurs in “Everything
Under the Sun,” about Jesse, a young man, who lets Cade, fif-
teen, live with him, because Cade’s brother died saving Jesse’s
life in the army. They argue, ostensibly because Cade doesn’t
have a job, but something dark and unspoken lies under the
tense back and forth:
“You never did give a straw if I lived or died, Jesse,” Cade
said, and he just managed to control his angry tears.
Jesse was silent, as on the evenings when alone in the dark,
while Cade was out looking for a job, he had tried to figure
out what he should do in his trouble.
“
Fact
is,” Cade now whirled from the window, his eyes
brimming with tears, “it’s all the other way around. I don’t
need you except for the money, but you need me
to tell you
what you are!
”
The archaic, resonant phrase “in his trouble” points to but does
not name what the “trouble” might be, while Cade’s statement
ascribes an obscure but, again, resonant motivation to Jesse.
Jesse eventually admits his need for Cade: “Of course your
brother saved my life, but you saved it again. I mean you saved
it more.” Cade agrees to stay, with a condition:
“But you leave me alone now if I stay,” Cade said.
“I will,” Jesse said, perhaps not quite sure what it was Cade
meant.
We aren’t sure either, and the ending elucidates nothing. Ear-
lier in the story, the heat makes Jesse remove his shirt, reveal-
ing the tattoo of “a crouched black panther.” At the end of the
story, Cade does the same, “exposing the section of his chest on
which rested the tattooed drawing of a crouched black panther,
the identical of Jesse’s.” Does the identical tattoo mean that
Jesse’s love for Cade—if that’s what it is—is reciprocated,
whatever that might mean in this context? Purdy doesn’t say,
because it’s not his style to say.
Another paradoxical aspect of these stories is that, for all
the sexual intensity, there is little physical description. One un-
published story, from 1956, is explicit, and mildly embarrassing:
“The Cuban’s head, with its thick entwined locks, fastened se-
curely to his organ like some great revolving planet of the heav-
ens.” For the most part, Purdy’s world is oddly non-physical.
It’s all dialog with stage directions on how the dialog is deliv-
ered. The physical locations are only sketched in lightly. As a re-
sult, when an object makes an appearance, it becomes charged
with significance.
In “Mr. Evening,” the title character, a young collector of
rare items, puts an ad in the paper: “a desperate plea, it turned
out, for information concerning a certain scarce china cup, circa
1910.” The ad reaches its intended target, Mrs. Owens, an older
woman who counts the cup among her heirlooms and invites
Mr. Evening to see it. He hesitates: “He was uneasy with old
women, he supposed ... [but] he wanted, he finally said out loud
to himself, that hand-painted china cup, 1910, no matter what it
might cost him.” When he does visit, Mrs. Owen moves to a
table that has an object on it: “It was the pale rose shell-like
1910 hand-painted china cup. ‘You don’t need to bring it to me!’
he cried, and even she was startled by such an outburst. Mr.
Evening had gone as white as chalk.”
After the obsessive repetition of the precise name (“1910”),
the object itself finally makes an appearance. All of Mr.
Evening’s desire, with its suggestions of sublimated erotic en-
ergy, is displaced onto the cup. At this point, however, we begin
to discover that Mrs. Owens’ desire needs no such displacement.
She eventually claims Mr. Evening as her own very precious
object, and, in the final scene, serves him coffee from the cup.
“He had put down the 1910 cup because it seemed unthinkable
to drink out of anything so irreplaceable, and so delicate that a
mere touch of his lips might snap it.” Mrs. Owens, on the other
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