Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“Yes,” she said gravely, conscious, he could not help but notice, of saying it so: gravely. “Don’t you know why?” she said at last.

“No.”

She sifted the cool discrete sand into her palm, where it made a perfect pyramid, shedding itself. “You say you never had sisters. Well, I never had a date, boyfriends — except a few boys in my ballet class who had foreheads this low. Rita and I got used to living quietly.”

“And now?”

“I guess I’m clinging to the nest like a big old cuckoo. Isn’t that awful?”

He shrugged.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked him.

“What do I want you to do?”

“Tell me.”

“How do you feel?”

“How do you feel? Do you still love me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you? Oh, I love you too.”

Why did this not sound right, here on Folly Beach in old Carolina in the moonlight?

One thing I’m sure of, thought he as he held her charms in his arms: I shall court her henceforth in the old style. I shall press her hand. No more grubby epithelial embraces in dogbane thickets, followed by accusing phone calls. Never again! Not until we are in our honeymoon cottage in a cottage small by a waterfall.

But when he kissed her and there she was again looking at him from both sides at once, he had the first inkling of what might be wrong. She was too dutiful and athletic. She worked her mouth against his (is this right, she as good as asked).

“Wonderful,” she breathed, lying back. “A perfect setting.”

Why is it not wonderful, he wondered, and when he leaned over again and embraced her in the sand, he knowing without calculating the exact angle at which he might lie over against her — about twenty degrees past the vertical — she miscalculated, misread him and moved slightly, yet unmistakably to get plainly and simply under him, then feeling the surprise in him stopped almost before she began. It was like correcting a misstep in dancing.

“What is it?” she whispered presently.

“Nothing,” he said, kissing her tenderly and cursing himself. His heart sank. Was it not that she was right and that he made too much of it? What it was, though, was that this was the last thing he expected. It was part of his expectations of the life which lay before him that girls would be girls just as camellias were camellias. If he loved a girl and walked with her on Folly Beach by moonlight, kissed her sweet lips and held her charms in his arms, it should follow that he would be simply he and she she, she as complete as a camellia with her corolla of reticences and allurements. But she, Kitty, was no such thing. She didn’t know any better than he. Love, she, like him, was obliged to see as a naked garden of stamens and pistils. But what threw him off worst was that, sentient as always, he found himself catching onto how it was with her: he saw that she was out to be a proper girl and taking every care to do the right wrong thing. There were even echoes of a third person: what, you worry about the boys as good a figure as you have, etc. So he was the boy and she was doing her best to do what a girl does. He sighed.

“What?” she asked again.

“Nothing,” he said, kissing her eyes, which were, at any rate, like stars.

He sighed again. Very well, I’ll be both for you, boyfriend and girlfriend, lover and father. If it is possible.

They stirred in the musical sand. “We’d better go back,” said the gentlemanly engineer and kissed her somewhat lewdly so she wouldn’t feel she had failed. It seemed to be his duty now to protect her non-virtue as best he could. After all, he mused, as he reckoned girls must have mused in other ages, if worst comes to worst and all else fails I can let her under me — I shan’t begrudge her the sacrifice. What ailed her, him, them, he wondered. Holding her hand as they returned to the Quality Court, he flexed his wrist so that he could count his pulse against her bone.

Mainly their trouble — or good fortune, as the case might be — was that they were still out of phase, their fervors alternating and jostling each other like bad dancers. For now, back at the cooler and she then going ahead of him with her pitcher on the rim of her pelvis, desire like a mighty wind caught him from behind and nearly blew him down. He almost fainted with old motel lewd-longing. “Wait,” he whispered— oh, the piercing sorrow of it, this the mortal illness of youth like death to old age. “Wait.” He felt his way along the blotting-paper wall like a blind man. She took his outstretched hand.

“What is it, dearest?”

“Let’s go in here,” he said, opening the door to a closet which housed a giant pulsing Fedders.

“What for?” she asked. Her eyes were silvery and turned in.

“Let us go in the service room.” For it is here and not by moonlight — he sighed. Her willingness and nurse-tenderness were already setting him at naught again.

“There you are,” said Rita, opening the door opposite. “Where in the world was the ice machine?”

And off he went, bereft, careening down the abstract, decent, lewd Quality corridor.

The next day they went their separate ways as before, he mooning off with Jamie in the Trav-L-Aire, keeping the days empty and ears attuned to the secret sounds of summer. They met again in Beaufort. Kitty and Rita filled the day with small rites. They both took Metrecal and made a ceremony of it at every stop, lining up the wafers on a Sèvres dish, assembling a miniature stove from Lewis and Conger to heat the water for their special orange-flavored tea. Or if Kitty had a hangnail, the afternoon was spent rounding up Q-tips, alcohol, cuticle scissors.

One hot night they stopped at a raw red motel on a raw red hillside in Georgia. The women had got tired of the coast and took to the upcountry in search of hooked rugs and antiques. And the engineer had to admit that it was the pleasantest of prospects: to buy a five-dollar chiffonier and come down through six layers of paint to old ribby pine from the days of General Oglethorpe.

The two youths had dawdled as usual and it was almost midnight when the Trav-L-Aire came groaning up the hill, bucket swinging under her like a Conestoga wagon, and crept into a pine grove bursting with gouts of amber rosin still fragrant from the hot afternoon. It was too hot to sleep. Jamie sat in the cab and read his Theory of Sets. The engineer strolled over to the cinder-block porch of the motel, propped his chair against the wall, and watched a construction gang flattening a hill across the valley. They were making a new expressway, he reckoned. The air throbbed with the machinery, and the floodlights over the hill spoiled the night like a cast in a black eye. He had noticed this about the South since he returned. Along the Tidewater everything was pickled and preserved and decorous. Backcountry everything was being torn down and built anew. The earth itself was transformed overnight, gouged and filled, flattened and hilled, like a big sandpile. The whole South throbbed like a diesel.

“—but here am I, Ree, twenty-one and never been to college!”

“Then go to a good one.”

He knew now why he had left the camper. It had come over him again, the old itch for omniscience. One day it was longing for carnal knowledge, the next for perfect angelic knowledge. Tonight he was not American and horny but English and eavesdropper. He had to know without being known.

Not ten feet behind him and through the open window, Rita and Kitty lay in their beds and talked. The Trav-L-Aire had crept up the hill with its lights out — had he planned it even then? He had come onto the porch as silently as an Englishman entering his burrow in Somerset.

“Have I told you what I want to be?”