Walker Percy - Love in the Ruins - The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

“I’m going in search of myself.”

My heart sank. This was not really her way of talking. It was the one tactic against which I was defenseless, the portentous gravity of her new beliefs. When she was an ordinary ex-Episcopalian, a good-humored Virginia girl with nothing left of her religion but a fondness for old brick chapels, St John o’ the Woods, and the superb English of the King James Version, we had common ground.

“Don’t leave, Doris,” I said, feeling my head grow heavy and sink toward the grits.

“I have to leave. It is the one thing I must do.”

“Why do you have to leave?”

“We’re so dead, Tom. Dead inside. I must go somewhere and recover myself. To the lake isle of Innisfree.”

“Jesus, let’s go to the lake isle together.”

“We don’t relate any more, Tom.”

“I’d like to relate now.”

“I know, I know. That’s how you see it.”

“How?”

“As physical.”

“What’s wrong with physical?”

Doris sighed, her eyes full of sunlight “Who was it who said the physical is the lowest common denominator of love?”

“I don’t know. Probably a Hindoo. Would you sit here?”

“What a travesty of love, the assertion of one’s conjugal rights.”

“I wasn’t thinking of my conjugal rights. I was thinking of you.”

“Love should be a joyous encounter.”

“I’m joyous.”

She was right. Lately her mournful spirituality had provoked in me the most primitive impulses. In ten seconds’ time my spirits had revived. My heart’s desire was that she sit on my lap in the yellow muscadine sunlight.

I took her about the hips. No Mercury she, here.

She neither came nor left.

“But we don’t relate,” said Doris absently, still not leaving though, eyes fixed on Saint Francis who was swarming with titmice. “There are no overtones in our relationship, no nuances, no upper mansions. Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul.”

“All right.”

“It’s not your fault or my fault. People grow away from each other. Spiritual growth is the law of life. Our obligation is to be true to ourselves and to relate to this law of life.”

“Isn’t marriage a relation?”

“Our marriage is a collapsed morality, like a burnt-out star which collapses into itself, gives no light and is heavy heavy heavy.”

Collapsed morality. Law of life. More stately mansions. Here are unmistakable echoes of her friend Alistair Fuchs-Forbes. A few years ago Doris, who joined the Unity church, got in the habit of putting up English lecturers of various Oriental persuasions, Brahmin, Buddhist, Sikh, Zoroastrian. Two things Doris loved, the English people and Eastern religion. Put the two together, Alistair Fuchs-Forbes reciting I Ching in a B.B.C. accent, and poor Episcopal Doris, Apple Queen, from Winchester, Virginia, was a goner.

Alistair Fuchs-Forbes, who came once to lecture at Doris’s Unity church, took to coming back and staying longer. He and his boy friend Raymond. Here they would sit, in my “enclosed patio,” on their broad potato-fed English asses, and speak of the higher things, of the law of life — and of the financial needs of their handicraft retreat in Mexico. There in Cozumel, it seemed, was the last hope of the Western world. Transcendental religion could rescue Western materialism. How? by making-and-meditation, meditating and making things with one’s hands, simple good earthbound things like clay pots. Not a bad idea really — I’d have gone with her to Cozumel and made pots — but here they sat on my patio, these two fake English gurus, speaking of the law of spiritual growth, all the while swilling my scotch and eating three-dollar rib-eye steaks that I barbecued on my patio grill. They spoke of Hindoo reverence for life, including cattle, and fell upon my steaks like jackals.

It didn’t take Alistair long to discover that it was Doris, not I, who was rich.

“A collapsed morality?”

“I am truly sorry, Tom.”

“I’m not sure I know what a collapsed morality means.”

“That’s it. It’s meaning we’ve lost. What is meaningful between us? We simply follow rules and habit like poor beasts on a treadmill.”

“There is something in that. Especially since Samantha died. But why don’t we work at it together. I love you.”

“I love you too, Tom. I’m extremely devoted to you and I always will be. But don’t you see that people grow away from each other. A part of one dies, but the rest grows and encysts the old part. Like the chambered nautilus. We’re dead.”

“I love you dead. At this moment.”

My arms are calipers measuring the noble breadth of her hips. She doesn’t yield, but she doesn’t leave.

“Dead, dead,” she whispered above me in the sunlight

“Love,” I whispered.

We were speaking in calm matutinal voices like a pair of wood thrushes fluting in the swamp.

“My God, how can you speak of love?”

“Come here, I’ll show you.”

“Here?” she said crossly. “I’m here.”

“Here.”

We had not made love since Samantha’s death. I had wanted to, but Doris had a way of ducking her head and sighing and looking elegiac that put me off and made me feel guilty besides. There is this damnable female talent for making a man ashamed, not merely turning him down but putting the guilt of it on him. She made me feel like a high school boy with impure thoughts. Worse than that: a husband with “conjugal rights,” and that’s enough to chill the warmest heart.

But not mine this morning. I pick up the napkin from my lap.

“Come here.”

“What for?” A tiny spark of old Virginny, the Shenandoah Valley, rekindling in her: her saying “what for” and not “why.”

“Come and see.”

What she did was the nicest compromise between her faraway stare, her sun worship, and lovemaking. She came closer, yet kept her eye on the titmice.

“But you don’t love me ,” she said to Saint Francis.

“Yes I do.”

She gave me a friendly jostle, the first, and looked down.

“Tch. For pity’s sake!” Again, a revival of her old Shenandoah good humor. “Annie Mae is coming, you idiot.”

“Close the curtains then.”

“I’m leaving,” she said but stood closer, again a nicely calculated ambiguity: is she standing close to be close or to get between me and the window so Annie Mae can’t see?

“Don’t leave,” I say with soaring hopes.

“I have to leave.”

Then I made a mistake and asked her where she was going.

Again her eyes went away.

“East of the sun and west of the moon.”

“What crap.”

She shrugged. “I’m packed.”

Knowing I was wrong, I argued.

“Are you going to meet Alistair and that gang of fags?”

Doris was rich and there was much talk of her financing the Cozumel retreat and even of her coming down and making herself whole.

“Don’t call him that. He’s searching like me. And he’s almost found peace. Underneath all that charm he’s—”

“What charm?”

“A very tragic person. But he’s a searcher like me, a pilgrim.”

“Pilgrim my ass.”

“Did you know that for two years he took up a begging bowl and wandered the byways with a disciple of Ramakrishna, the greatest fakir of our time?”

“He’s a fakir all right. What he is is a fake Hindoo English fag son of a bitch.” Why did I say the very thing that would send her away?

Here was where I had set a record: that of all cuckolds in history, I am the first American to be cuckolded by two English fruits.

“Is that what he is?” said Doris gravely.

“Yes.”

“What are you, Tom?”

“I couldn’t say.”