Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

He got Kitty across the table fairly enough but she was not onto the game he wanted to play. Instead of dealing the ancient honorable Bicycle cards he’d brought from the hotel and playing gin rummy in good faith for itself (That was it! Ordinary things such as gin rummy had lost weight, been evacuated. Why?) and worrying about the storm in good faith and so by virtue of the good faith earning the first small dividends of courtship, a guarding of glances, a hand upon the deck and a hand upon the hand — most happy little eight of clubs to be nestled so in the sweet hollow of her hand, etc. — instead she gazed boldly at him and used up their common assets, spent everything like a drunken sailor. She gazed like she kissed: she came on at him like a diesel locomotive.

“Oh me,” he sighed, already in a light sweat, and discarded the jack of clubs.

“Aren’t you picking up jacks?” he reminded her.

“Am I?” she said ironically but not knowing the uses of irony.

Look at her, he thought peevishly. She had worn leotards so many years she didn’t know how to wear a dress. As she sat, she straddled a bit. Once in a Charleston restaurant he had wanted to jump up and pull her dress down over her knees.

Abruptly she put her cards down and knocked up the little Pullman table between them. “Bill.”

“Yes.”

“Come here.”

“All right.”

“Am I nice?”

“Yes.”

“Am I pretty?”

“Sure.”

“I mean, how would I look to you if you saw me in a crowd of girls?”

“Fine. The best, in fact.”

“Why don’t I think so?”

“I don’t know.”

She stretched out her leg, clasping her dress above the knee; “Is that pretty?”

“Yes,” he said, blushing. It was as if somehow it was his leg she was being prodigal with.

“Not crippled?”

“No.”

“Not muscle-bound?”

“No.”

“I worry about myself.”

“You don’t have to.”

“What do you really think of me? Tell me the literal truth.”

“I love you.”

“Besides that.”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Oh darling, I didn’t mean that. I mean, do you also like me? As a person.”

“Sure.”

“Do you think other boys will like me?”

“I don’t know,” said the engineer, sweating in earnest. Great Scott, he thought in dismay. Suppose she does have a date with another “boy.”

“I mean like at a dance. If you saw me at a dance, would you like to dance with me?”

“Sure.”

“Do you know that I’ve danced all my life and yet I’ve never been to a regular dance?”

“You haven’t missed much,” said the engineer, thinking of the many times he had stood around picking his nose at Princeton dances.

“Do you realize that I’ve hardly ever danced with a boy?”

“Is that right?”

“What does it feel like?”

“Dancing with a boy?”

“Show me, stupid.”

He switched on the Hallicrafter and between storm reports they danced to disc-jockey music from Atlanta. There was room for three steps in the camper. Even though they were sheltered by the dunes, now and then a deflected gust sent them stumbling.

She was not very good. Her broad shoulders were shy and quick under his hand, but she didn’t know how close to hold herself and so managed to hold herself too close or too far. Her knees were both workaday and timid. He thought of the long hours she had spent in dusty gymlike studios standing easy, sister to the splintery wood. She was like a boy turned into a girl.

“Will I do all right?”

“Doing what?”

“Going to dances.”

“Sure.” It was this that threw him off, her having to aim to be what she was.

“Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“How to do right.”

“Do right?” How to tell the sweet Georgia air to be itself?

“Do you love me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

The storm crashed around them. Kitty drew him down to the lower bunk, which was like the long couch in an old-style Pullman drawing room. “Hold me tight,” she whispered.

He held her tight.

“What is it?” she asked presently.

“I was thinking of something my father told me.”

“What?”

“When my father reached his sixteenth birthday, my grandfather said to him: now, Ed, I’m not going to have you worrying about certain things — and he took him to a whorehouse in Memphis. He asked the madame to call all the girls in and line them up. O.K., Ed, he told my father. Take your pick.”

“Did her

“I guess so.”

“Did your father do the same for you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t know until this minute that it was hore. I thought it was whore.”

“No.”

“My poor darling,” said Kitty, coming so close that her two eyes fused into one. “I think I understand what you mean. You’ve been brought up to think it is an ugly thing whereas it should be the most beautiful thing in the world.”

“Ah.”

“Rita says that anything two people do together is beautiful if the people themselves are beautiful and reverent and unself-conscious in what they do. Like the ancient Greeks who lived in the childhood of the race.”

“Is that right?”

“Rita believes in reverence for life.”

“She does?”

“She says—”

“What does Sutter say?”

“Oh, Sutter. Nothing I can repeat. Sutter is an immature person. In a way it is not his fault, but nevertheless he did something dreadful to her. He managed to kill something in her, maybe even her capacity to love.”

“Doesn’t she love you?”

“She is terrified if I get close to her. Last night I was cutting my fingernails and I gave her my right hand to cut because I can’t cut with my left. She gave me the most terrible look and went out. Can you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. I’ll be your whore.”

“Hore.”

“Hore.”

“I know,” said the engineer gloomily.

“Then you think I’m a whore?”

“No.” That was the trouble. She wasn’t. There was a lumpish playfulness, a sort of literary gap in her whorishness.

“Very well. I’ll be a lady.”

“All right.”

“No, truthfully. Love me like a lady.”

“Very well.”

He lay with her, more or less miserably, kissed her lips and eyes and uttered sweet love-murmurings into her ear, telling her what a lovely girl she was. But what am I, he wondered: neither Christian nor pagan nor proper lusty gentleman, for I’ve never really got the straight of this lady-and-whore business. And that is all I want and it does not seem too much to ask: for once and all to get the straight of it.

“I love you, Kitty,” he told her. “I dream of loving you in the morning. When we have our house and you are in the kitchen in the morning, in a bright brand-new kitchen with the morning sun streaming in the window, I will come and love you then. I dream of loving you in the morning.”

“Why, that’s the sweetest thing I ever heard in my life,” she said, dropping a full octave to her old unbuttoned Tallulah-Alabama voice. “Tell me some more.”

He laughed dolefully and would have but at that moment, in the storm’s lull, a knock rattled the louvers of the rear door.

It was Rita, looking portentous and solemn and self-coinciding. She had a serious piece of news. “I’m afraid something has come up,” she said.

They sat at the dinette, caressing the Formica with their fingertips and gazing at the queer yellow light outside. The wind had died and the round leaves of the sea grapes hung still. Fiddler crabs ventured forth, fingered the yellow decompressed air, and scooted back to their burrows. The engineer made some coffee. Rita waited, her eyes dry and unblinking, until he came back and she had her first swallow. He watched as the muscles of her throat sent the liquid streaming along.