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

“Don’t mention it. One piece of advice.”

“Yes?”

Dusty begins his rhythmic nodding again as the artery pounds away.

“Lola has a lot more use for you than I do, though I used to. I know you been through a bad time. But let us understand each other.” He still looks straight ahead.

“All right.”

“You going to do right by Lola or, Doctor, I’m going to have your ass. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Goodbye, Doctor.”

“Goodbye.”

Leaving Dusty’s car, I skirt the festive booths of the Bible Brunch.

The heat of the concrete pool apron strikes up like the Sahara sands. The sun strikes down into the top of my head. Chunks of Styrofoam water-toys are scattered in the weeds like dirty wedding cake. The pool is empty and drifted with leaves.

Why has the pool been abandoned?

A breath of cool air stirs in the doorway of the old pro shop bearing the smell of leather and of splintered pine flooring. The shop too is empty save for a life-size cutout of Gene Sarazen dipping toward the floor. Gene is dressed in knickerbockers and a British cap. A trumpet vine sprouts through the floor and twines around a rusty mashie.

Why is the pro shop empty? Is there a new pro shop in another part of the building?

It was not empty when I stood here and kissed Lola.

I went to the catfish fry and fell in love with Lola and performed with her the act of love in the grassy kidney-shaped bunker of number 18 green (par 4, 275 yards).

I was standing in the Paradise Country Club bar shaking the worn leather cup of poker dice and gazing at the rows of bottles lined up against the brand-new antiqued wormholed cypress, when I noticed something. The vines had begun to sprout It was the first time I had noticed it. A whitish tendril of vine, perhaps ivy, had sprouted through a wormhole and twined about a bottle of Southern Comfort.

“Give me a drink of Southern Comfort,” I told Ruby, the bartender, and watched to see if he would notice anything amiss.

Ruby, a thin sly Chinese-type Negro, took the bottle without noticing the tendril, which broke off in his hand.

“How long has that vine been here?”

“What vine?”

“In your hand.”

He shrugged.

“How long has it been since anybody asked for Southern Comfort?”

“It been a while,” said Ruby with a sly smile. “Christmas gif, Doc.”

Absently I gave him a bill, a dollar.

Ruby’s face went inscrutable like an Oriental’s. He expected, rightly, a higher tip at Christmas. The dollar was received as an insult. We dislike each other. He sucked his teeth. Leaving him and my drink, I went out among the catfish crowd and found myself hemmed up with Lola Rhoades against a stretch of artificially wormholed cypress.

The pro shop seems to darken in the morning light. Gene Sarazen straightens. I sit on a pedestal holding a display of irons arranged in a fan. There is a chill in the room. The summer spins back to chilly azalea crucifixion spring, back further to Christmas with its month of cheerful commercial jingling shopping nights and drinking parties.

I see Lola clearly, holding her gin fizz.

“I am glad to see you,” says Lola, who is five feet nine and in her high heels looks me straight in the eye and says what she thinks.

“So am I,” I say, feeling a wonder that there should be such a thing as a beautiful six-foot woman who is glad to see me. Women are mythical creatures. They have no more connection with the ordinary run of things than do centaurs. I see her clearly, gin fizz in one hand, the other held against her sacrum, palm out, pushing herself rhythmically off the wall. Women! Music! Love! Life! Joy! Gin fizzes!

She is home for Christmas from Texas A & M. She looks like her father but the resemblance is a lovely joke, a droll commentary on him. His colorlessness, straw hair, straw skin, becomes in her a healthy pallor, milkiness over rose, lymph over blood. Her hair is a black-auburn with not enough red to ruin her skin, which has none of the green chloral undertones of some redheads. Her glance is mild and unguarded. It is the same to her whether she drinks or does not drink, talks or does not talk, looks one in the eye or does not look.

She drinks and hisses a cello tune in her teeth and pushes herself off the wall.

The gin fizzes come and go. We find we can look into each other’s eyes without the usual fearfulness and shamefulness of eye meeting eye. I am in love.

A Negro band, dressed in impressed Santa suits, is blasting out Christmas carols. Bridge-playing ladies surround us, not playing bridge but honking their Wednesday bridge-playing honks and uttering Jewish-guttural yuchs which are fashionable this season.

Lola asks me something. I cannot hear and, stooping, put my ear to her mouth, registering as I go past a jeweled reflection of red and green Christmas lights in a web of saliva spinning between parted rows of perfect teeth.

“Don’t you want to ask about your patient?”

“You look well. How are you?” I had treated her last summer for a mild depression and a sensation of strangeness, quite common these days, upon waking in the morning.

“Well enough,” she says, nodding in order to lever her sacrum off the wall. “But you seem — odd.”

“Odd?” I speak into her ear, which crimsons in the canal like a white orchid.

“You look both happy and — sad.”

It is true. Women are so smart. In truth I am suffering from simultaneous depression and exaltation. So I tell her about it: that this very day I perfected my invention and finished my article, which will undoubtedly be recognized as one of the three great scientific breakthroughs of the Christian era, the others being Newton hitting on his principles and Einstein on his field theory, perhaps even the greatest of all because my discovery alone gives promise of bridging the dread chasm between body and mind that has sundered the soul of Western man for five hundred years.

She believes me. “Then why do you feel bad?”

I explain my symptoms in terms of my discovery: that when one records the thalamic radiation, a good index of one’s emotional state, it can register either as a soaring up, a sine curve, or a dipping down, a cosine curve. “Mine registers both at the same time, sine and cosine, mountain on a valley.”

She laughs, thinking I am joking.

“Why should that be?”

Since I am in love, I can feel with her, feel my sacrum tingle when hers hits the wall.

“Well, I’ve won, you see. Won the big one. But it’s Christmas Eve and I’m alone. My family is dead. There’s nobody to tell.”

“Tell me:”

“Do you know what I planned to do tonight?”

“No.”

“Go home and watch Perry Como’s Christmas show on stereo-V.” Perry Como is seventy and still going strong.

Lola nods sympathetically, ducks her head, drinks, and hisses a tune in her teeth. I bend to listen. It is the Dvořák cello concerto.

Trays pass. I begin to drink Ramos gin fizzes with one swallow. At one time I was allergic to egg white but that was long ago. These drinks feel silky and benign. The waiters too are dressed as Santa. They grin sideways from their skewed Santa hoods and shout “Christmas gif!” I give them money, a dollar, ten dollars, whatever.

“Listen to this,” I tell Lola and hum the Don Quixote theme in her ear.

“Very good. You have absolute pitch. And you look better! Your face is fuller.”

I feel my face. It is fuller.

“I feel fine. I am never happier than when I am in love.”

“Are you in love?”

“Yes.”

“Who with?”

“You.”

“Ah huh,” says Lola, nodding, but I can’t tell whether the nodding is just to get her sacrum off the wall.