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

She nodded absently, but now (!) her hand is on my head, ruffling my hair and strumming just as she used to strum her fingers on the Formica in the kitchen.

“Who was it who said: if I were offered the choice between having the truth and searching for it, I’d take the search?”

“I don’t know. Probably Hermann Hesse.”

“Hadn’t we better close the curtains?”

“Yes. You do it. I can’t get up.”

She laughed for the first time in six months. “Boy, you are a mess.”

We’re back in Virginia, at school, under the apple blossoms.

She looked down at me. “Annie Mae’s going to see you.”

“She’d be proud of me.”

“Don’t be vulgar.”

Annie Mae is a big hefty black girl whom Doris dressed up like a French maid with a tiny white cap and a big butterfly bow on her tail.

“Sit in my lap.”

“How?”

“This way.”

“O.K.”

“Easy!”

“Oh boy,” she said, nodding and tucking her lip in her old style. Her hand rested as lightly on my shoulder as it did at the Washington and Lee Black-and-White formal. What a lovely funny Valley girl she was before the goddamn heathen Oriental English got her.

“You know the trouble with you, Tom?” She was always telling me the trouble with me.

“What?”

“You’re not a seeker after the truth. You think you have the truth, and what good does it do you?”

“Here’s the truth.” Nobody can blaspheme like a bad Catholic.

“Say what you like about Alistair,” she said — and settled herself! “He’s a seeker and so am I.”

“I know what he seeks.”

“What?”

“Your money.”

“That’s how you would see it.”

“That’s how I see it.”

“Even if it were true, would it be worse than wanting just my body?”

“Yes. But I don’t want just your body.”

“What do you want?”

“You.”

“But not the real me.”

“Jesus.”

But she was jostling me, bumping me carelessly like a fraternity brother in a stagline.

“You know the trouble with you, Tom?”

“What?”

“You don’t understand a purely spiritual relationship.”

“That’s true.”

Somewhere Doris had got the idea that love is spiritual. So lately she’d had no use for my carrying on, as she called it, or messing about, putting her down in the zoysia grass, etcetera, with friendly whacks on the thick parts and shouts of joy for the beauty of the morning, hola! I do truly believe that she came to look upon her solemn spiritual adultery with that fag Alistair as somehow more elevating than ordinary morning love with her husband.

“You never grasped that,” said Doris, but leaning closer and giving me a hug.

“Then grasp this.”

We sat in the chair, the chair not being an ordinary chair, which would have been fine, but a Danish sling, since in those days ordinary chairs had canceled out and could not be sat on. Married as we were and what with marriage tending to cancel itself and beds having come not to be places for making love in or chairs for sitting on, we had no place to lie or sit. We were like forlorn lovers in the street with no place to go.

But love conquers all, even a Danish sling.

“Darling,” said Doris, forgetting for once all the foolishness.

“Let’s lie down,” I said.

“Fine, but how?”

“Just hold still. I’ll pick you up.”

Have you ever tried to get up out of a Danish sling with a hundred-and-forty-pound Apple Queen in your lap?

But I got up.

We lay on the bricks, here in this spot Perhaps this is why I feel better lying here now. Here, at any rate, we lay and made love for the last time. We thought no more of Hermann Hesse that day.

In two weeks she was gone. Why? I think it was because she never forgave me or God for Samantha’s death.

“That’s a loving God you have there,” she told me toward the end, when the neuroblastoma had pushed one eye out and around the nosebridge so that Samantha looked like a two-eyed Picasso profile. After that, Doris went spiritual and I became coarse and disorderly. She took the high road and I took the low. She said I was like a Polack miner coming up out of the earth every night with no thought but to fill his belly and hump his wife. The expression “hump” shocked me and was unlike her. She may have lost her faith but she’d always kept her Virginia-Episcopal decorum. But she’d been reading current novels, which at the time spoke of “humping” a great deal, though to tell the truth I had not heard the expression. Was this a word invented by New York novelists?

At last, getting up and keeping clear of the windows, I fetch my medical bag, which is packed this morning not merely with medicines but with other articles that I shall presently describe, and stick the revolver in my belt and slip out the lower “woods” door at the back of the house where it is impossible to be seen by an assailant lurking in the swamp.

The door, unused since Doris left, is jammed by vines. I squeeze through into the hot muscadine sunlight. Here the undergrowth has almost reached the house. Wistaria has taken the stereo-V antenna.

Two strides and I’m swallowed up in a plantation of sumac. It is easy to keep cover and circle around to the swamp edge and have a long look. Nothing stirring. Egrets sail peacefully over the prairie. A wisp of smoke rises from a hummock. There some drughead from Michigan State lies around smoking Choctaw cannab while his girl fries catfish.

I rub my eyes. Did I imagine the sniper’s shots? Was it part and parcel of the long night’s dream of Verdun, of the terrible assault of the French infantry on Fort Douaumont? No. There is the shattered window of the “enclosed patio.”

What to do? The best course: walk to town by a route known only to me in order to avoid ambush. Call the police at the first telephone.

But in the thick chablis sunlight humming with bees, it is hard to credit assassination. A stray guerrilla perhaps, using my plate glass for target practice.

Anyhow, I have other fish to fry. First to the Center, where I hope to have a word with Max Gottlieb, ask a favor of him; then perhaps catch a glimpse of Moira in Love Clinic; thence to Howard Johnson’s to arrange a trysting place, a lover’s rendezvous with Moira, my love from Love.

Afterwards there should be time for a long Saturday afternoon in my office — no patients, no nurse today — where I shall sip Early Times and listen to my father’s old tape of Don Giovanni with commentary by Milton Cross.

Using my bag to fend off blackberries, I angle off to a curve of Paradise Drive where the woods notch in close.

Standing in the schoolbus shelter, now a cave of creeper and muscadine, I get my bearings. Across the road and fifty feet of open space, a forest of longleaf begins. A hundred yards into it and I should pick up the old caddy path that leads from town to country club.

Wait five minutes to be sure. No sound but the droning of bees in honeysuckle.

Step out and — bad luck! In the split second of starting across, a car rounds the curve. There’s no not seeing him or he me. It’s like turning the corner of a building and walking into someone’s arms.

He stops. It is no stranger. But do I want to see friends now? I get along with everybody except people. Psychiatrist, heal—

It is Dr. George “Dusty” Rhoades in his new electric Toyota bubbletop, a great black saucer of a car and silent as a hearse.

He’s waving me in. Hm, not exactly my choice for a companion. Why? Because he’s Lola’s father and he may believe I have injured him, though I have not. Shall I accept the lift? The question does not arise. The fierce usages of friendship take command. Dusty leans out waving and grinning. Before I know what I’m doing I’m grinning too and hopping around to the door with every appearance of delight.