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

“Christmas gif!”

Another black Santa passes and I take three gin fizzes. The tingling sacrum should have been a warning, but love made me happy, love and the sight of tiny jewels strung along the glittering web of saliva. Her membranes are clear as light, the body fluids like jeweler’s oil under a watch crystal. A lovely inorganic girl.

Her company stabilizes me. Abstracted still, my orbit becomes lower. Bending close to her, close to the upper reaches of her breast, is like skimming in silence, power off, over the snowy slopes of Kilimanjaro. I close my eyes.

“When I close my eyes, I can see you teaching cello in the Texas A & M cello class, a drafty gym-like room, the cello between your knees. It is during a break and you’re wearing a sweatshirt and resting your arm on the cello.”

“Ah huh.” She nods. “It gets cold in there.” She believes everything I say, knowing it is true.

Handing Lola her gin fizz, I touch her. A hive, a tiny red wheal, leaps out at the point of touch, as if to keep touch. The touch of her is, as they say, a thrill.

“Why did you bring your physician’s bag here?” Lola asks me.

“I haven’t been home yet. The first working model of my lapsometer is inside, can’t afford to lose it.”

“Can you really measure a person’s innermost self?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Can you measure mine?”

“Sure.”

“Do it.”

“Where? Right here?”

“Yes.”

“Well — over here.” Taking her by the hand, I lead her through the bridge women to the pro shop. We stand behind Gene Sarazen while I take a few snapshots of her with my Brownie.

She registers zero anxiety — music saves her! she goes dreaming through the world as safe and sure as Schubert’s trout — but her interpersonal wave is notable in two respects: it is both powerful and truncated, lopped off at the peak like Popocatepetl.

“Well?”

“You see?” I show her the snail tracks on jade, a faint cratered Fuji in a green dawn.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you have a heart full of love and no one to give it to, but that is not so bad because you have your music, which means a great deal to you.”

“Yes. I don’t. It does. Yes!”

Now it is she who does the hemming up and I who am backed up against the cypress, sacrum fiery and quilted. My head is turning against the wormholes. Hairs catch and pop.

“Why is that?” she asks, brown eyes level with mine.

“Why is what?”

“Why is there — no one?”

“Well you’re a bit much, you know. You scare most men. Also, your music is hard to compete with. You always hear singing.” I show her the lilting curve of her aesthetic radiation.

“Yes! I understand! It is true! Can love be like that?”

She takes my hand urgently, her cello calluses whispering in my palm.

“Yes, it can, if the love is like that, singing.”

“Do you love me like that?”

“Yes.”

“How do I know?”

I kiss her hand. My lip leaps out to keep touch, ridges with a wheal.

She feels it. “Good heavens!”

We are laughing and touching.

“Christmas gif!”

A waiter comes up. We take four gin fizzes. Under the monk-like Santa hood, I recognize a Negro named Willard Amadie. Long ago he used to be a caddy, before the electric surreys came along. A very strong short black man, he would stand down the fairway for the drive and with the heavy bag still on his shoulder take a full swing at the clover with an iron. It is a surprise to see him. Years ago he went off to the Ecuadorian wars and became, I heard, a career soldier. Somber even as a youth, he’d stand waiting at the lie, club selected and proffered handle first, face bitter-black, bee-stung, welted laterally like an Indian’s.

Now he’s dressed like Santa and grinning a ghastly grin.

“Christmas gif, Doc!”

I look at him.

“What’s wrong, Willard?”

“Nothing, Doc! Christmas gif to you and missee.”

“Missee?” The outer corners of my eyes are filling up with hives, forming a prism. Willard and Lola are edged in rainbows. “What in hell are you talking about?”

Willard doesn’t leave but stands watching. His sclerae are yellow as egg yolk. At last I give Willard ten dollars, blushing, as I do so, with rage or shame, I’m not sure which.

“Thankee, Doc!” says Willard in the same goofy Gullah accent. “May you and missee have many a more!”

I refuse to look at Willard, watching instead sections of a road map, pieces of highway, dots of towns, drifting across my retina.

But Lola is pleased. She sees Willard’s courtliness (what is wrong with him?) as a sanction. Christmas is sanctioned. Our love is sanctioned. Willard’s nutty good manners (something is up, I know that, like the vines sprouting, but what?) are part of the singing, life made to lilt.

“Let’s go outside,” I say, to go outside but mainly to get away from Willard, and take her again by the hand, her left hand, her fingering hand, calluses whispering in my palm.

Out into the gloaming we go.

It was a warm Christmas Eve. A south wind blows fat little calypso clouds over a new moon.

We kiss in the grassy bunker. She kisses oddly, stooping to it, developing a torque and twisting down and away, seeming to grow shorter. Her breath catches. What she puts me in mind of is not a Texas girl at all but a smart Northern girl, a prodigy who has always played the cello ten hours a day, then one day finds herself at a summer festival and twenty-one and decides it is time to be kissed. So she stoops to it with an odd, shy yet practiced movement, what I fancy to be the Juilliard summer-festival style of kissing.

Now her hands are clasped in the small of my back. My hands are clasped in the small of her back. She hisses Dvorak. My hot chicken blood sings with albumen molecules. Her hand is warm and whispery as a horn.

We lie in the grassy bunker, she gazing at the winter constellations wheeling in their courses, I singing like a cello between her knees. Fiery Betelgeuse hangs like a topaz in the south. We kiss hungrily, I going around after her.

“Doris,” I whisper, forgetting she is Lola. Fortunately my breath whistles in my throat and she doesn’t hear me.

She is like Doris, except for her Juilliard torque and her odd going-away persimmon-tasting kisses. A big lovely girl, big and white and cool-warm, a marble Venus with a warm horned hand.

Her callused fingertips strew stars along my flanks. Hot wheats of love leap forth at her touch.

“What’s the matter with you?” Lola asks, leaning out of the moon’s shadow to inspect my bumps.

“I’ve got hives.”

“You’ve got bobos on your shoulder,” she says, minding my bobos attentively and curiously like a child.

When I look sideways, the wedge of sky is narrower.

“Hold still, hon,” she whispers, from Tyler Texas now, Juilliard forgotten. “You’ll be all right. Lola’ll hold you tight.”

“I have to go.”

“Where you going?”

“For a walk. Stay here, I’ll be right back.”

I can’t hold still. Why? The longing is back. Longing for what? I don’t know. For Doris? For the Valley of Virginia and sycamore trees and cicadas unwinding in October? I don’t know. God knows.

Now running down 18 fairway, knowing it in the black dark (for the “old” 18 is the terrain of my youth), to the tee and back, eyes squeezed shut like a Chinaman’s. Back to the bunker to lie at Lola’s breast a blind babe. My scalp quilts and pops. Lymph engorges me. Love returns. Again I sing between Lola’s knees, blind as a bat.

Go now, I try to tell her, you better leave, but my larynx squeaked shut.

So it was that Lola, noble cellist, saved my life at the cost of her reputation. She could have gone, left me to die in the bunker, swell up and die and be found stiff as a poker in the foggy dew. But she fetched her brother, who fetched Willard Amadie, and they both fetched me home, finding me in some disarray, I think, for Lola, putting first things first, had thought only to save my life.