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

“What job? Oh. Well, I’m afraid there’s going to be some trouble around here. You’re sure you didn’t notice anything unusual this morning?”

“Unusual? No. I did meet that funny little man who was helping you yesterday.”

“Helping me?”

“Helping you pass out your props. Wow, how did you do it?”

“He wasn’t helping me. He was — never mind. What was he doing this morning?”

“Nothing. He passed me carrying a box.”

“How big?”

“Yay big.”

I frown. Ordinarily I don’t like girls who say yay big .

The box. Oh my. Terror flickers. I take a drink.

“He was very polite, knew my name and all. In fact, he sent his regards to you. How did he know I was going to see you? Did you tell him?”

“Certainly not.”

“Rub some of this on me, Tommy.” She hands me the ancient Pompeian phial of Coppertone.

“O.K. But you realize you can’t go in the pool.”

“Ugh,” she says, looking at the pool. “I can’t. What’ll I do?”

“I’ll show you. But let me rub you first.”

Foreseeing everything, I had earlier made an excuse and hopped up to the room, cranked up the generator and turned on the air-conditioner.

Now, when Moira’s had enough of the sweat and the grease and the heat, I lead her by the hand to the balcony. From the blistering white heat of the concrete we come into a dim cool grotto. Fogs of cold air blow from the shuddering tin-lizzy of an air-conditioner. The yellow bed lamp shines down on fresh sheets. A record player plays ancient Mantovani music — not exactly my favorite, but Moira considers Mantovani “classical.”

Moira claps her hands and hugs me.

“Oh lovely lovely lovely! How perfect! Whose room?”

“Ours,” I say, humming There’s a Small Hotel with a Wishing Well .

“You mean you fixed it up like this?”

“Sure. Remember the way it was?”

“My heavens. Sheets even. Air-conditioner. Why did you do it?”

“For love. All for love. Let me show you this.”

I show her the “shower”: a pistol-grip nozzle screwed onto two hundred feet of garden hose hooked at the other end to the spigot in the Esso station grease-rack next door.

“And soap! And towels! Go away, I’m taking my shower now.”

“O.K. But let me do this.” I turn on the nozzle to get rid of two hundred feet of hot water.

While Moira showers, I lie on the bed and look at The Laughing Cavalier and the Maryland hunt scene in the wallpaper. Mantovani plays, the shower runs, Moira sings. I mix a toddy and let it stand on my chest and think of Doris, my dead wife who ran off to Cozumel with a heathen Englishman.

Doris and I used to travel the highways in the old Auto Age before Samantha was born, roar seven hundred miles a day along the great interstates to some glittering lost motel twinkling away in the twilight set down in the green hills of Tennessee or out in haunted New Mexico, swim in the pool, take steaming baths, mix many toddies, eat huge steaks, run back to the room, fall upon each other laughing and hollering, and afterwards lie dreaming in one another’s arms watching late-show Japanese science-fiction movies way out yonder in the lost yucca flats of Nevada.

Sunday mornings I’d leave her and go to mass. Now here was the strangest exercise of all! Leaving the coordinate of the motel at the intersection of the interstates, leaving the motel with standard doors and carpets and plumbing, leaving the interstates extending infinitely in all directions, abscissa and ordinate, descending through a moonscape countryside to a — town! Where people had been living all these years, and to some forlorn little Catholic church up a side street just in time for the ten-thirty mass, stepping up on the porch as if I had been doing it every Sunday for the past twenty years, and here comes the stove-up bemused priest with his cup (what am I doing out here? says his dazed expression) upon whose head hands had been laid and upon this other head other hands and so on, for here off I-51 I touched the thread in the labyrinth, and the priest announced the turkey raffle and Wednesday bingo and preached the Gospel and fed me Christ—

— Back to the motel then, exhilarated by — what? by eating Christ or by the secret discovery of the singular thread in this the unlikeliest of places, this geometry of Holiday Inns and interstates? back to lie with Doris all rosy-fleshed and creased of cheek and slack and heavy-limbed with sleep, cracking one eye and opening her arms and smiling.

“My God, what is it you do in church?”

What she didn’t understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.

Moira comes out wound up in a towel, rubbing her short blond hair with another towel.

“Feel me.”

The flesh of her arm is cold-warm, the blood warmth just palpable through her cold smooth skin.

“Let me get up to take a shower.” Moira is sitting in my lap. She won’t get up so I get up with her and walk around holding her in my arms like a child.”

“Don’t,” says Moira.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t take a shower.”

“Why not?”

“I like the way you smell. You smell like Uncle Bud.”

“Who is Uncle Bud?”

“He had a chicken farm out from Parkersburg. I used to go see him Sunday mornings and sit in his lap while he read me the funnies. He always smelled like whiskey and sweat and seersucker.”

“Do I look like Uncle Bud?”

“No, you look like Rod McKuen.”

“He’s rather old.”

“But you both look poetic.”

“I brought along his poems for you.”

“Which ones?”

“The ones about sea gulls.”

“You’ve thought of everything.”

“You’re a lovely girl,” I say, holding and patting her just as I used to pat Samantha when she had growing pains.

“Do you love me?”

“Oh yes.”

“How much?”

“Enough to eat you,” I say and begin to eat her kneecap.

“Enough to marry me?”

“What?”

“Do you love me enough to marry me?”

“Oh yes.”

“Do you know what I’ve always wanted?”

“No.”

“To keep some chickens.”

“All right.”

“Golden banties. You know what?”

“What?”

“That work at the clinic is a lot of bull. I’d love to stay home raising golden banties while you are doing your famous researches.”

“All right.” I suck the cold-warm flesh of her forearm covered by long whorled down. The fine hair rises to my mouth and makes a skein like the tiny ropes that bound Gulliver.

“Could we live in Paradise?”

“Certainly.”

Eating her, I have visions of golden cockerels glittering like topazes in the morning sun in my “enclosed patio.”

“When?”

“When what?”

“When will we do that?”

“Whenever you like,” I say, marveling at her big littleness. My arms gauge a secret amplitude in her. She is small and heavy.

“No really. When?”

“When we leave here.”

“When will that be?”

“A week, a month. Perhaps longer.”

“My Lord,” says Moira, straightening in my arms like a child wanting to be put down. “What do you mean?”

“I’m afraid something is going to happen today, in fact is happening now, which will make it impossible for us to leave here for a while. At least until I make sure it’s safe for us either in Paradise or the Center.”