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

“There you go!” cries Dusty in an eccentric greeting that has evolved between us over the years. Renewed friendship sweeps all before it. We are like lovers after a quarrel.

Dusty is a big surgeon with heavy freckled hands that like to feel your bones and a red rooster shock of hair gone straw-colored in middle age. It is his manner to pay terrific attention to the controls of his car, the dials of the dashboard, while shouting eccentric offhand remarks. So does he also shout, I know, at his operating nurse, not to be answered or even to be heard but to make an occupational sound, so to speak.

“Fine, fine,” I say, settling myself. He nods and keeps on nodding.

Dusty Rhoades is a conservative proctologist, though he does other surgery as well, from Tyler, Texas. He played tackle for Texas A & M, is a reserve Air Force colonel. An excellent surgeon, he works fourteen hours a day, caring nought for his own comfort, and owns a chain of Chicken Delight stands. The money rolls in faster than he can spend it even though he bought Tara, the showplace of Paradise, and an $80,000 Guarnerius cello for his daughter Lola.

Like saints of old, Dusty spends himself tirelessly for other men, not for love, he would surely say, or even for money, for he has no use for it, but because people need him and call him and what else would he do with himself? His waking hours are spent in a dream of work, nodding, smiling, groping for you, not really listening. Instead, his big freckled hands feel your bones like a blind man’s. He’s conservative and patriotic too, but in the same buzzing, tune-humming way. His office is stacked with pamphlets of the Liberty Lobby. In you come with a large-bowel complaint, over you go upside down on the rack, in goes the scope, ech! and Dusty humming away somewhere above. “Hm, a diverticulum opening here. The real enemy is within, don’t you think?” Within me or the U.S.A., you are wondering, gazing at the floor three inches from your nose, and in goes the long scope. “You know as well as I do who’s really causing the trouble, don’t you?” “Do you mean—?” “I mean the Lefts and Commonists, right?” “Yes, but on the other hand—” In goes the scope the full twenty-six inches up to your spleen. “Oof, yessir!”

“Am I glad to see you, you rascal!” cries Dusty, coming out of his trance and looking over at me. His hand, going its own way, explores the crevices of my knee.

I blink back the beginning of a tear. He’s forgiven me! Why do I forget there is such a thing as friends?

He’s forgiven what he could only have understood as my misconduct with his daughter Lola, and misconduct it was, though in another sense it was not. Lola and I were discovered by him lying in one another’s arms in the deep canyon-size bunker of the eighteenth hole. Though Lola is twenty-six, single, and presumably had the right to embrace whomever she chose, I fancied nevertheless that Dusty took offense. Though he was careful not to let me know it and I was careful not to find out. Certainly no offense was intended. Lola is a big, beautiful, talented girl who teaches cello at Texas A & M. We fell in love for a few hours last Christmas Eve, literally fell, came upon each other like strangers in a forest and fell to the ground in one another’s arms, and the next day went our separate ways, she back to Texas and I to the nuthouse broken out with giant hives and quaking with morning terror and night exaltations.

The consequences of this misbehavior in Paradise, where everyone else behaves very well, were muted by my self-commitment to the mental hospital. Thus, it is possible that I have been expelled from the local medical society: no notices have come in the mail — but on the other hand, perhaps notices were suspended because of my illness. I dare not inquire. One consequence was certain: an anonymous communication did come in the mail, a copy of the Hippocratic oath with that passage underlined which admonishes physicians about their relations with female patients. But Lola was not, at the time, my patient

“You making house calls, Doctor!’ Dusty shouts.

I jump. “No no. I was … I felt like walking to town.” For some reason I do not wish to speak of the sniper.

Dusty nods vigorously, as if my stepping out of the woods with my medical bag was no more or less than he expected. But even as he speaks, his eyes caress the mahogany dashboard and brass knobs and dials. These days it is the fashion to do car interiors in wood and brass like Jules Verne vehicles.

When we shake hands, he opens his meaty hand to me in his old tentative way like a porter taking a tip.

“I wish I could work like you!” he shouts at the rushing pines. “It must take discipline to cut down hack work and make time for research and writing.”

How graceful and kind of him. Though Dusty knows all there is to know about me, my family troubles, my cuckoldry, my irregular life, my alcoholism — he connives at the best available myth about me, that I am “smart” but unlucky. People are kind. They find it easy to forgive you in the name of tragedy or insanity and most of all if you are smart. Certain mythic sayings come easily to the lips of my doctor friends when they wish to speak well of me, and lately they do since they know I’ve had a bad time of it. They’ll speak of a mythic, storied diagnosis I made ten years ago….

“No, I’m not working today,” I tell Dusty. “I have a few errands to run, then I’m going down to my office and fix myself a little drink and listen to the opera.”

“Yes! Right! Absolutely!” cries Dusty joyfully and strikes himself eccentrically in several places.

He fiddles with the controls. All of a sudden a hundred-piece orchestra is blasting away on the back seat, playing Viennese Waltz Favorites. The hot glistening pines fall away as the road climbs along the ridge. The dry refrigerated air evaporates my sweat. Strains of Wienerblut lilt us over the pines. We might be drifting along in a Jules Verne gondola over happy old Austria.

I feel better. There are no ruins here. We are beginning to pass sparkling new houses with well-kept lawns. What a lovely silent car. What lovely things money can buy. I have money. Why not spend it? Until this moment it has never occurred to me to spend a penny of Doris’s two million on myself. I look down at my frayed cuffs, grubby fingernails. Why not dress well, groom myself, buy a good car, meet friends for lunch, good fellows like Dusty, chaff with them, take up golf? Money is splendid!

But today I have other fish to fry.

“Would you mind dropping me off at the plaza?”

“What in hell for?” asks Dusty, frowning. But his freckled hand continues to browse among the knobs and dials.

“I have a date.”

When I left the hospital, I resolved not to lie. Lying cuts one off. Lying to someone is like blindfolding him: you cannot see the other’s eyes to see how he sees you and so you do not know how it stands with yourself.

“Like the fellow says, that’s a hell of a place to take a woman. All those tramps, outlaws …”

“Yes, well … I think it’s safe.”

“Is that why you’re wearing your handgun?”

“What?” I had forgotten my pistol and didn’t see Dusty look at it. The gun had worked its way around to my belt buckle where it sticks out like Billy the Kid’s six-shooter. “The fact is somebody took a shot at me this morning.”

“That a fact?” says Dusty with routine astonishment expressing both incredulity and affection. “I tell you the truth, nothing would surprise me nowadays.”

“It was probably a wild shot from some nut in the swamp,” I say, shoving the pistol out of sight. Indeed, is anything less likely than a sniper on this lovely old-fashioned Viennese morning?