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

“You’ll prove it, Chief,” says Ellen confidently. She tells me a story about a famous Presbyterian (she said) named Robert the Bruce who sat discouraged in a cave and watched a spider try seven times to span the cave with its web before it succeeded. “Remember Robert the Bruce!”

“O.K. Who’s the next patient?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Ted Tennis.”

“Are you going to take Mr. Ives back to the hospital?”

“No. They’ll send for him.”

“Very well. Goodbye, Mr. Ives. Don’t worry. You’re going to be all right.”

He takes my hand with his old wiry grip. I can’t understand why he won’t talk. His prefrontal gyrus is as normal as mine.

Ted ’n Tanya are next. They must have come directly from Love. It is a bit of a surprise that they’ve come here, since his former complaint of impotence had been pretty well cleared up by my prescription of an occasional tramp through the swamp, so successfully in fact that only today I’ve learned that Ted ’n Tanya have become star performers in Love.

They come in together and sit opposite me across the desk. Ellen closes the door and turns on the lights and leaves discreetly. Hm. Have they come to gloat, to tell me of the superiority of Love Clinic to the swamp? But no. They look glum.

But Ted is more than ever the alert young crop-headed narrow-necked Oppenheimer. Tanya is an angular brunette who has smoldering violet eyes, one of which is cocked, and wears a ringlet of hair at each temple like a gypsy. They love each other, do Ted ’n Tanya, and, though heathen, are irrevocably monogamous and faithful.

That much I know. Ted brings me up to date. The swamp treatment of impotence did indeed work for a while but wore off after a few months, as I had told Ted it might. Whereupon they applied for treatment at Love, where they were put in a Skinner box and conditioned so successfully that they became one of the first volunteer couples in the new program of “multiple-subject interaction.” A breakthrough. Here too, encouraged by Stryker, Dr. Helga Heine, and Father Kev Kevin, they succeeded admirably.

“I understand that. The only thing that puzzles me is why you’re here at all.” Making sure Ellen is up front, I open the drawer of organs and recover my Early Times. Ted ’n Tanya don’t mind my drinking.

“I know,” says Ted glumly.

“Weren’t you over at Love today?” I ask them, pouring a little toddy.

“Yes,” whispers Tanya, one lovely violet eye fixed on me, the other drifting out a bit as if it were keeping track of my second self, my pneuma.

“Well?” They’re sitting side by side on a bench, like children in the principal’s office. “How did it go today in Love?”

Ted ’n Tanya look at each other. “It didn’t,” says Ted.

“It hasn’t for weeks,” whispers Tanya.

“Hm. I expect the effect of the conditioning is wearing off too, though to tell you the truth I’ve always suspected that the good results came more from the sympathetic third party, the observer, rather than—”

“Exactly!” cries Ted.

Puzzled, I wait.

Again Ted ’n Tanya exchange glances. “Shall we tell him, Tanya?” She nods.

“Tell me what?”

Ted leans forward, big Oppenheimer head bobbing on its slender neck. “That we never did succeed at home.”

“You mean—”

“I mean even at the peak of our performances at Love, we were never able to achieve orgasm at home, except after floundering around the swamp, but even that wore off.”

“Pity. Would you care for a drink?”

“No thanks, Tom.”

We fall silent. The storm is closer. Thunder rumbles.

I sigh and open the drawer. “Well, I suppose you’re here for a Bayonne-rayon member.”

But Ted is shaking his head. “That’s not the idea, Tom.”

“You don’t want a member?”

“No.”

“Then what can I do for you?” I am genuinely puzzled.

Ted leans forward. “Tom, you were right in thinking that it was the presence of the sympathetic observer that was crucial.”

“Yes?”

“The trouble with the observers in Love Clinic is precisely that, that they are too clinical.”

“Yes?”

“We thought perhaps if we could enlist the services of an observer-therapist team who were more sympathetic and in surroundings less clinical.”

“Hm.”

“When we put the two ingredients together, friend plus professional, naturally our thoughts turned in this direction.”

“What direction?”

“To you and Miss Oglethorpe.”

“You want me and Miss Oglethorpe …”

“We thought we could use your waiting room with that wonderful campy old couch, and you and Miss Oglethorpe could stay in the examining room with the door cracked and spy a bit, to add piquancy to the observer factor.”

“Miss Oglethorpe is a Presbyterian.”

“So what? Don’t Presbyterian nurses treat patients?”

“I expect she’s gone home.”

“No, she said she’d wait.”

I spill my drink. “You mean you asked her?”

“She said anything you wanted to do was all right with her.” Ted turns to Tanya. “Do you know what that couch reminds me of?”

“I know, I know.”

“The porch at the old dorm in Lansing.”

“I know, I know,” says Tanya, looking at Ted, but her out eye strays toward me.

“I’m feeling like a kid, wow,” says Ted, rising. “I’ll go get Miss Oglethorpe.”

“Wait,” I say.

“Yes?”

“Why Miss Oglethorpe? Why the two of us? Why not me?”

Ted frowns impatiently. “Studies in Palo Alto have shown that when observers are of both sexes, successful reconditioning increases by sixty-two percent.”

“Yes. Hm. But I fear today is out of the question. I’m tied up.” The prospect of watching Ted ’n Tanya make love is lugubrious enough, but it is the enlisting of Ellen Oglethorpe that makes me nervous. In fact, I’ve broken out in a cold sweat.

“You couldn’t give us half an hour, Tom?” asks Tanya, patting a gypsy ringlet.

“I’m afraid not.”

“What about Wednesday?” asks Ted.

“Yes!” I say, seizing at the straw. By Wednesday anything could happen. The world could end. “Check with Ellen for a new appointment.”

“Dear?” Ted stretches out both hands to Tanya, lifts her up. Ted is smiling. Two spots of color grow in Tanya’s cheeks. They exit, arms about each other like Rudolfo and Mimi.

I sit in the dark wondering where Ellen is. The storm breaks at last. My lapsometer gleams in the lightning flashes. If only … If only my lapsometer could treat as well as diagnose, I wouldn’t be caught up in these farces.

The back door is open. The tape rolls. Don Giovanni begins his descent into hell. A bolt of lightning strikes a transformer with a great crack. Sparks fly. The ox-lot is filled with a rinsing blue-white light Trees jump backward. The lights go out.

Ellen comes in to tell me she is leaving and that someone else wants to see me.

“I’m not seeing any more patients.”

“I think he’s a detail man. He said he wouldn’t keep you long.”

“But—”

“Don’t forget, Chief, your mother expects you tomorrow.”

“What? Wait—”

But she’s gone. In the lightning flashes a man seems to come forward by jumps. He carries an outsize attaché case like a drug salesman.

“Look, I see detail men on weekdays.”

But he’s not a detail man.

“Art Immelmann is the name,” he says, sticking his hand across the desk. “Funding is my game.”

“Very good, Art, but—” I notice gloomily that he’s sat down. Did he say Immerman, or Immelmann like the German ace and inventor of the Immelmann turn?