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

She shushes me, seals my lips with her finger, and, glancing through the open door at Lillian who is unwiring herself, brushes her lips with her fingers, brushes mine.

“You better go.”

“Yes.” Ah.

Returning to the observation room, I sink into a chair and dreamily watch Lillian dress. Here’s my trouble with Moira. She’s a romanticist and I’m not. She lives for what she considers rare perfect moments. What I long to share with her are ordinary summer evenings, cicadas in the sycamores.

She whispers behind me. “Where are we going this time? To Dry Tortugas again? Chicken Itza? Tombstone?”

I shrug and smile. She likes to visit ghost towns and jungle ruins, so I’ll show her the one in our back yard, the ruined Howard Johnson motel. She’ll savor the closeness of it. One weekend we flew to Silver City, Arizona, and stood in the deserted saloon and watched tumbleweeds blow past the door. “Can’t you just hear the old rinky-dink piano?” she cried and hugged me tight “Yeah,” I said, taking delight in the very commonplaceness of her romanticism. “How about a glass of red-eye, Moira?” “Oh yes! Yes indeed!”

Lillian dresses quickly, pins on her Lois Lane hat, using the viewing mirror as her vanity, shoulders her bag, trudges out

In comes the next subject. No, subjects. A couple. I recognize one, a medical student who is doubtlessly making money as a volunteer. He is J.T. Thigpen, a slightly built, acned youth who wears a blue shirt with cuffs turned up one turn. He carries a stack of inky books in the crook of his wrist. His partner, whom the chart identifies only as Gloria, is a largish blonde, a lab worker, to judge from her stained smock, with wiry bronze hair that springs out from her head. Volunteers in Love get paid fifty dollars a crack, which beats giving blood.

“These kids are our pioneers,” Stryker tells me, speaking softly now for some reason. “And a case in point. Something has gone wrong. Yet they were our first and best interaction subjects. Our problem, of course, with using two subjects was one of visualization. Colley, who is a wizard, solved that for us with his Lucite devices. We can see around curves, you see, between bodies. So we figured if Colley could help us out in mechanics, you could help us out with interpersonal breakdowns. How about it?”

“Well …”

Gloria and J.T. are undressing. J.T. takes off his shirt, revealing an old-fashioned undershirt with shoulder straps. He’s a country boy from hereabouts. The spots of acne strewn across his shoulders turn livid in the fluorescent light. Removing his wristwatch with expansion band, he hesitates for a moment, then hangs it on the crank handle of the hospital bed.

Gloria wears a half-slip, which comes just short of her plump white knees, and a half-brassiere whose upper cusps are missing.

“Okay, keeds!” cries Helga, clapping her hands into the microphone. “ Mach schnell! Let’s get the show on the road!”

“We have found,” Stryker explains to me, “that you can inspire false modesty and that by the same token a brisk no-nonsense approach works wonders. Helga is great at it!”

I clear my throat and stretch up my heavy-lidded eyes. My nose is a snout.

“I’ve got to be going.”

J.T. and Gloria, half-undressed, are standing around like strangers at a bus stop. J.T. sends his fingers browsing over his acned shoulder. Gloria stands foursquare, arms angled out past her hips as if she were carrying milkpails.

Father Kev Kevin clears the orgasm circuit. He won’t look at me.

“I’ve got to be going, Stryker.”

“Wait. How can you spot the hangup if you don’t watch them?”

“Yeah. Well, later. Thank you very much, all of you. Hm. I’m already late—” I look at my watch and start for the door.

“Wait! Ted ’n Tanya are next. They’re our best. Or were. Don’t you want to—”

“No.”

“What about the job?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“We’re funded, man! The money is here!”

“Very good.”

Leaving, I catch a final glimpse of J.T. Thigpen, bare-chested and goose-pimpled, gazing around the porcelain walls with the ruminant rapt expression of a naked draftee.

“ Mach schnell! Keeds—” cries Helga, clapping her hands.

Whew! Escape! Escape, but just in time to run squarely into Buddy Brown, my enemy, in the corridor.

He smiles and nods and grips my arms as if we shared a lover’s secret. What secret? Who is he waiting for?

I brush past and do not wait to find out. Am I afraid to find out?

To the motel to fix a room for a tryst with Moira on the Fourth. No sign of sniper or anyone else for that matter. But I take no chances, slip into Howard Johnson’s through the banquet room where the rent Rotary banner still flies from Tuesday’s meeting five years ago:

Is it the truth?

Is it fair to all concerned?

Will it build goodwill and better friendships?

and straight up the inside stairs without exposing myself to the patio.

Room 203, the most nearly intact, was nevertheless a mess when we first saw it: graffiti, illuminations of hairy pudendae, suspicious scraps of newspaper littering the floor. The beds moldy, the toilet fouled. I’ve been working on the room for a month, installed a generator for air-conditioner and TV and coffee-maker and lights and bed vibrators; brought in hose water from Esso station next door; laid in supplies for a day or so.

And I haven’t finished. This weekend, knowing what I know, I’ll lay in supplies for six months, plus clothes for Moira, books, games. All hell will break loose on the Fourth and Moira and I may need a place to stay. What safer place than a motel in no man’s land, between the lines so to speak?

This is the place. Moira, in fact, picked it. She and I came here for a few minutes last month. She likes the byways. That weekend we hadn’t time to fly to Merida or Tombstone. So we took a walk. A proper ruin this, and what is more, it has a bad reputation and people don’t come here. But I think it is safe. The whites think the black guerrillas have it. The blacks think the white drug-heads have it. Neither wants any part of the other, so both stay away. I think.

Moira was delighted with the motel. There was a soupçon of danger, just enough. She clutched my arm and shrank against me. We stood by the scummy pool. Spanish moss trailed from the balcony. Alligator grass choked the wading pool. A scarlet watersnake coiled under the lifeguard’s perch. Moira found a pair of old 1960 harlequin glasses and an ancient vial of Coppertone.

“It’s like Pompey!” she cried.

“Like what? Yes, right.”

We kissed. Ruins make her passionate. Ghosts make her want to be touched. She is lovely, her quick upturned heart-shaped face and gold-brown eyes bright with a not quite genuine delight, a willingness rather to be delighted. Are you going to delight me? isn’t this the time? aren’t things falling out just right? Pleasing her is fathoming and fulfilling this expectation. Her face. Her cropped wheat-colored hair with a strong nap that aches my hand to brush against, her rather short tanned perfect legs drawn with strong simple strokes like the Draw Me girl in magazine contests. She’s poor, having left her West Virginia parents early and supported herself in civil service, worked in Bethesda for N.I.M.H. before transferring here. I can see her in Washington in the evening washing out her things in the washstand, keeping her budget, minding herself…. But she has her own views and likes. She opposes the war in Ecuador, subscribes to Playgirl , a mildly liberated, mildly Left magazine, and carries in her purse a pocket edition of Rod McKuen, a minor poet of the old Auto Age, which she likes to read aloud to me: “Don’t you just love that?” “Yes.” But what I love is her loving it, her faintly spurious love of loving things that seem lovable.