Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“Never mind. What about you, you big geezer?”

Geezer, thought the engineer. “What about me?”

“You were the one who was always sweeping Kitty off her feet before! What happened?” She even socked him, jokingly but also irritably. The poor girl could not get the straight of it: the engineer’s alternating fits of passion and depression.

He was wondering: had the language of women, “love” and “sweeping one off one’s feet,” and such, meant this all along, the astounding and terrific melon immediacy of nakedness. Do women know everything?

“What about it, friend?” asked Kitty, heaving up, her pale face swimming above him. “Kitty wants to know.”

“Know what?”

“Is this the same Will Barrett who swept Kitty off her feet in the automat?”

“No, but it’s just as well,” he said dryly.

“Tell Kitty why.”

“Kitty might be too attractive,” said the chivalrous but wry engineer. “So attractive that it is just as well I don’t feel too well — for one thing, my sinuses are blocked—”

“Oh that’s sweet,” said Kitty in as guttural, as ancient and risible and unbuttoned an Alabama voice as Tallulah Bankhead. Did he know anything about women?

“Do you feel bad,” she asked suddenly and touched his face. “If it is not possible now to—” she broke off.

He felt just bad enough — his head was caulked, the pressure turning him ever away into a dizzy middle distance — and so it was just possible.

“Lover,” said Kitty as they hugged and kissed.

“Darling,” said the engineer, not to be surpassed — was this it at last, the august secret of the Western world?

“My sweet,” said Kitty, patting his cheek at the corner of his mouth.

But is love a sweetnesse or a wantonnesse, he wondered.

Yet when at last the hard-pressed but courteous and puisant engineer did see the way clear to sustaining the two of them, her in passing her test, him lest he be demoralized by Perlmutter’s heaven, too much heaven too soon, and fail them both — well, I do love her, he saw clearly, and therefore I shall — it was too late.

“Dear God,” said the girl to herself, even as he embraced her tenderly and strongly — and fell away from him.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m so sick,” she whispered.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” he said, shaking his head dolefully. Even their sicknesses alternated and were out of phase.

She went to the farthest corner of the sniper’s den and began to retch. The engineer held her head. After a moment she asked in a dazed voice. “What happened?”

“I think it was that tea you were drinking.”

“You are so smart,” she said faintly.

What with her swaying against him, he was having a hard time finding her clothes. It was too much for a man to follow, he mused, these lightning hikuli-transformations from Kitty as great epithelial-warm pelvic-upcurving-melon-immediate Maja to Kitty as waif, huddled under his arm all ashiver and sour with gastric acid. But when they were dressed, they felt better. Now trousered, collared, buttoned up, he at least was himself again. There is a great deal to be said for clothes. He touched Kitty to place her, like a blind man. To his relief she sat hugging her decent skirted knees like a proper Georgia coed.

“Do you feel better?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said, hardly audible. “But talk to me.”

“What about?”

“Anything. Anything that comes into your head.”

“All right.” After all, this was one thing he was good at. “I was thinking about the summer of 1864,” said the engineer, who always told the truth. “My kinsman took part in the siege of Richmond and later of Petersburg. We have a letter he wrote his mother. He was exactly my age and a colonel in the infantry. Petersburg was a rats’ war, as bad as Stalingrad. But do you know that even at the worst the officers would go to balls and cotillions? In the letter he thanks his mother for the buttermilk cookies and says: ‘Met Miss Sally Trumbull last night. She said I danced tolerably well. She gave me her handkerchief.’ He was killed later on in the Crater.”

“Would you take me to a dance?” asked Kitty, her head turned away.

“Sure. But what is curious is that—”

“I’ve been dancing five hours a day for years and I can’t remember the last dance I went to.”

“—he did not feel himself under the necessity, almost moral, of making love—”

“I love to dance.”

“—in order that later things be easy and justified between him and Miss Trumbull, that—”

“My grandmother composed the official ATO waltz at Mercer,” said Kitty.

“—that even under the conditions of siege he did not feel himself under the necessity, or was it because it was under the conditions of siege that—”

“You’re so smart,” said Kitty, shivering and huddling against him. “Oh, I’m so cold.”

“I must speak to your father,” said the engineer absently.

The girl started nervously and stopped shivering. “What for?”

“To ask your hand in marriage,” said the engineer somewhat formally.

“You know everything,” said Kitty, commencing to shiver again. “You’re so smart.”

“No, but I know one thing.”

“Tell Kitty.”

“I know what you fear most.”

“What?”

“People, and that is the trouble. The source of your happiness is also the source of your nightmares.”

“That’s true.”

Even now he was at it again, scheming, establishing his credentials. Like all women, she was, he knew, forever attuned to fortunetelling, soothsaying, and such. If he told her something, she might tell him. For there was something he wanted to know.

“I know who you like to be with.”

“Who?”

“Rita and me.”

“That’s right. Why is that?”

“You like Rita because she is among other things a woman and no threat to you. You like me and that would be enough to put you off ordinarily because I am a man but you know something is wrong with me and that neutralizes the threat.”

“Yes,” said the girl gloomily. “Oh, dear. I really don’t feel well.”

“What about Rita?”

“What about her?” He could scarcely hear her.

“What about the notes, verses, and so on, she leaves in the park for you?” He had calculated correctly. Knowing as much as he did about her, he judged that in her eyes it must appear he might know everything. She would not think to ask how he knew about the notes. For all she knew, Rita could have told him.

“The notes in the bench, yes. It is not quite what you think.” Was she now smiling down at her crossed legs?

Kitty said:

The notes. You know, I have a confession to make. I led her on. It’s my fault.

Here it comes again, he thought, the sweet beast of catastrophe. Am I not like Rita after all and do I not also live by catastrophe? I can smell it out every time. Show me a strange house and I can walk straight to the door where the bad secrets are kept. The question is: is it always here that one seeks one’s health, here in the sweet, dread precincts of disaster? Strange: that her disaster now enables me, that now I could love her again and more easily from the pity of it.

No, no, no, Kitty said, I don’t mean there was anything really wrong. Nothing has ever happened, not the least thing. But what I don’t know is whether from the very beginning I didn’t know in my heart of hearts what I was doing — the way a child knows nothing and yet knows everything. I’ve often wondered whether a person who found herself for the first tune in her life really and truly liked by another person and having the power for the first time to make another person like her, would she not use that power every time? Rita is a remarkable person and, wonder of wonders, she liked me. I had never dreamed that anybody would like me. And I knew exactly how to make her like me! This whole thing started last summer. The notes? They’re notes, that’s all. Poems.