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

A turtle plopped into the pool.

“Can’t you just see them!” she whispered, swaying against me.

“Who?”

“All the salesmen and flappers.”

“Yes.”

“Aah!” said Moira, stretching out on a convex lounge which pushed her up in the middle. I perched somewhat precariously beside her.

Moira, who is twenty-two and not strong on history, thinks that the great motels of the Auto Age were the haunt of salesmen and flappers of the Roaring Twenties. Whereas, of course, it was far more likely that it was the salesman and his wife and kids and station wagon who put up here in the sixties and seventies.

A green lizard did push-ups on Moira’s lounge, blew out a red bladder. Moira screamed and hopped into my lap. We kissed. I kissed her smooth biscuit-shaped kneecaps. Her eyes were fond and faraway. “Just think,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s all gone. Gone with the wind.”

“Yes.”

“The lion and the lizard keep The courts where Samson gloried and drank deep.”

“Right.” I held her close, melting with love, and whispered in her ear: “The wild ass stamps o’er his head, but cannot break his sleep.”

“Don’t be nasty!” cried Moira, laughing and tossing her head like Miss Clairol of olden time.

“Sorry.”

Taking my hand like a child, she led me exploring. In a rusted-out Coke machine in the arcade we found warm, five-year-old Cokes. I opened two, poured out half and filled the bottles with Early Times.

“This is how the salesmen and flappers used to drink.”

“Wonderful!” She took a big swig.

The hot sun blazed in the patio. We could not swim in the foul pool. So we sweated and drank Coke and bourbon like a salesman and a flapper. The Spanish moss stirred on the balcony. We went up to get the breeze. Then we explored the rooms, sat on the moldering bed in 203 and drank some more.

“A penny for your thoughts,” said Moira thoughtfully.

“I fancy you. Do you fancy me?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s lie down.”

“On this? Ugh.”

“Then let’s sit in the chair.”

“Not today, Josephine.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t bring my Cupid’s Quiver.”

“Your what?”

“My sachet, silly.”

“I’m not sure I understand. In any case, I don’t mind.”

“I do.”

“Then let’s have a drink.”

Again she took a mighty pull. Again we kissed. Her gold eyes gleamed.

“Ugh,” she said again, noticing the graffiti and pudendae on the walls. Damn, why didn’t I clean the walls? But she refused to be shocked by dirty pictures. To prove it, we had to make a museum tour. Love, where is love now? We gazed at the poor penciled organs, same and different, same and different, like a figure in the wallpaper, and outside the swifts twittered down the sky and up sang the old skyey sounds of June and where was love?

So we walked hand in hand and read the graffiti. Moira had taken a course in semantics and knew there was nothing in dirty words.

Above the Gideon Bible: For a free suck call room 208.

Moira shook her head sadly. “What an unhappy person must have written that.”

“Yea. That is, yes.” Desire for her had blown my speech center. “Love, I, you,” I said.

“Love I you too,” she said, kissing me, mouth open, gold eyes open.

Holding hands, we read the graffito under The Laughing Cavalier: Room 204 has a cutout on her pussy.

“The poor man.”

“Yes.”

“What is a cutout?”

“It is a device salesmen used to attach to their auto mufflers.”

“But how—? Never mind. Ummm, what a good place for a picnic!”

“Yes.”

“Far from the maddening crowd.”

“That’s true.”

It was then that the notion occurred to me to fix the room up properly and spend a weekend here.

“Tom, do you remember that quaint little hotel in Merida?”

“Yes, I do.”

“There’s a small hotel. With a wishing well.”

“Right.”

“Remember the coins we threw in the fountain after our love and the wish we made?”

“Yes.”

She is right. I must remember that women like to think of the act of love as a thing, “our love.” There are three of us, like a family, Moira and I and our love.

“I wish you’d worn your Mexican pleated shirt.”

“Why?”

“You look just like Rod McKuen, if you had more hair.”

“He’s an old man.”

“No, he’s not. Look.” She showed me his picture on the back of her book, Rod hoofing it along a California beach, arms open to the sea gulls.

“That was twenty years ago.”

“Let’s have a picnic here.”

“We will.”

“A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou.”

“Yes, thou.”

That was last month. I’ve been working on this room ever since. Today I finish the job. No bowerbird ever prepared a bower for his love more carefully.

The hard work was done last week, Delco generator installed downstairs, hose run two hundred feet from the Esso station faucet up through the bathroom window.

Room 203 still has suspicious smells. Pull back curtains, open front panels and bathroom window to get a breeze. Unpack from doctor’s bag and line up on dresser: one saniflush, one wick deodorizer, one tube of cold solder, one roll of toilet paper, one boxed gift copy of Stanyan Street , one brass shower head, one jar of instant coffee.

Half an hour and my work is done, floors mopped, fungoid mattresses and horrid foam-rubber pillows slung over balcony rail to sun, coffee-maker restocked, graffiti wiped from wall revealing original hunt-and-hound design, Laughing Cavalier straightened, ancient color TV and bed vibrator plugged into Delco lead, shower head screwed onto hose from Esso station and tested (hot bitter hose water), Stanyan Street lined up with the Gideon.

Test vibrator: sit on bed and drop in quarter. Z-Z-Z-Z-Z goes the vibrator and suddenly I am thinking not of Moira but of Samantha, my dead daughter, and the times she and I and Doris used to travel in the Auto Age all over the U.S.A. and Samantha would explore the motel and drop coins in every slot. First off she’d have found the Slepe-Eze and fed it a quarter.

Tears spurt from my eyes. Removing a pint of Early Times from my bag, I sit on the humming bed and sip a few drinks.

Why does desire turn to grief and memory strike at the heart?

Off to town. Past empty Saint Michael’s Church and school, a yellow brick dairy-barn-with-silo.

Here I went to mass with Samantha, happy as a man could be, ate Christ and held him to his word, if you eat me you’ll have life in you, so I had life in me. After mass we’d walk home to Paradise through the violet evening, the evening star hard by the red light of the TV tower like a ruby and diamond in the plush velvet sky, and I’d skip with happiness, cut the fool like David while Samantha told elephant jokes, go home, light the briquets, drink six toddies, sing Tantum Ergo , and “Deh vieni alla finestra” from Don Giovanni and, while Samantha watched Gentle Ben , invite Doris out under the Mobile pinks, Doris as lusty and merry a wife then as a man could have, a fine ex-Episcopal ex-Apple Queen from the Shenandoah Valley. Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you.

Cliff swallows are nesting in the fenestrated concrete screen in front of Saint Michael’s.

In this Catholic church, the center did not hold. It split in three, Monsignor Schleifkopf cutting out to the right, Father Kev Kevin to the left, leaving Father Smith. There is little to be said about Father Smith since he is in no way remarkable, having been a good and faithful if undistinguished priest for twenty-five years, having baptized the newborn into a new life, married lovers, shriven sinners, comforted the sick, visited the poor and imprisoned, anointed the dying, buried the dead. He had his faults. He was a gray stiff man. Like me, he was thought to drink and on occasion was packed off, looking only a bit grayer and stiffer than usual, to a Gulf Coast home for addled priests. Now he and his little flock are looking for a new home, I hear, having used for a while a Pentecostal church and later Paradise Lanes, my bowling alley here in the plaza, until it became too dangerous.