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

“What do you mean ? When I left there this morning, the place was dead as a doornail.”

“For one thing a revolution may have occurred. There is a report that guerrillas from Honey Island are in Paradise. I fear too that there may be disorders today at the political rally near Fedville.”

“You don’t have to go to this much trouble to keep me here, you know.”

“Let me show you something.”

I carry her to the window, where she pulls back the curtain. Five columns of smoke come from the green ridge above the orange tiles of the ice-cream restaurant.

“There was only one fire when I was there earlier.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’re burning the houses on the old 18.”

“O my Lord.”

“But that’s not the worst. I’m afraid my invention has fallen into the wrong hands.”

“What does that mean?”

“Two things. Civil war and a chain reaction in the Heavy Sodium deposits.”

“But I can’t stay here.” Moira straightens in my arms again.

“Why not?”

“I don’t have anything to wear! All I have is the clothes on my back — the clothes in there, that is.”

“Let me show you something else. Open the top drawer.”

She opens it. “What in the world?” The top drawer has underclothes, blouses, slips. The other drawers have skirts, dresses, shorts, etcetera.

“Whose are they?” asks Moira, frowning.

“Yours.”

“Were they your wife’s?”

“No. She’d make two of you.”

“Gollee.” Moira gets down, opens the bottom drawer, sits drumming her fingers on the Gideon. “And what are we going to live on? Love?”

“Let me show you.”

I take her to the closet. She gazes at the crates and cartons stacked to the ceiling, cartons of Campbell’s chicken-and-rice, Underwood ham, Sunmaid raisins, cases of Early Times and Swiss Colony sherry (which Moira likes). And the Great Books stacked alongside.

“That’s enough for a small army.”

“Or for two people for a long time.”

“Who’s going to read all those books?”

“Well read them aloud to each other.”

Think of it: reading Aeschylus, in the early fall, in old Howard Johnson’s, off old I-11, with Moira.

“What about Rod McKuen?”

“He’s over there. Under the Gideon.”

“There’s no pots and pans,” says Moira suddenly.

“The kitchenette’s next door.”

“Good night, nurse.”

“Let me show you something else.” We sit on the bed. “Put this quarter in the slot there.”

The Slepe-Eze starts up and sets the springs gently vibrating.

“Oh no!” Moira’s eyes round. “I guess they had to have this.”

“They?”

“The salesmen.”

“Yes.”

“Those poor lonely men. Think of it.”

“Yes.”

“Making love and dying in a place like this, far from home.”

“Dying?”

“The Death of a Salesman.”

“Right. Come sit in Uncle Bud’s lap.”

“All right. Honey?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s have children.”

“All right.” How odd. The idea of Moira and me having a child is the oddest thing in the world. But why? “First, let’s fix us a drink.”

“All right.”

She sits in my lap and we drink. She insists on whiskey rather than her sherry since that was what the flappers and salesmen drank.

“This beats Knott’s Berry Farm,” she whispers.

“Yes.”

One difference between Moira and my wife, Doris, is that Doris liked motels that were in the middle of nowhere, at the intersection of I-89 and I-23 in the Montana badlands. While Moira likes a motel near a point of interest such as Seven Flags over Texas.

Now we lie in one another’s arms on the humming bed. She is as trim and quick as one of her banty hens. She’s a West Virginia tomboy brown as a berry and strong-armed and — legged from climbing trees.

Cold fogs of air blow over us, Mantovani plays Jerome Kern. “I love classical music,” whispers Moira. The Laughing Cavalier smiles down on us, hundreds of Maryland hunters leap the same fence around the walls.

Locked about one another we go spinning down old Louisiana misty green, slowly revolving and sailing down the summer wind. How prodigal is she with and how little store she sets by her perfectly formed Draw-Me arms and legs.

Now she lies in the crook of my arm, eyes open, tapping her hard little fingernail on her tooth. Her little mind ranges far and wide. She casts ahead, making plans, no doubt, doing my living room over. I took her there once and it was an unhappy business, she keeping her head down and looking up through her eyebrows at Doris’s great abstract enamels that went leaping around the walls like the seven souls of Shiva.

“Do you like my hair long?”

“Do you call it long now?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

When my daughter, Samantha, was a freshman in high school, she had her first date, a blind one for the Introductory Prom, the boys from Saint Aloysius drawing the Saint Mary’s girls from a hat. Samantha and I sat waiting for the date, I with my instructions not to open the front door until she had a chance to leave the room so that she could then be a little late, she with her blue pinafore skirt tucked under her fat knees. We watched Gunsmoke as we waited. The boy didn’t come. Gunsmoke gave way to the Miss America pageant. Bert Parks went nimbly back-stepping around snaking the mike cord out of his way. Samantha’s acne began to itch.

“I wouldn’t have missed this, Poppa,” said Samantha as we watched Miss Nebraska recite “If” in the talent contest. But she was clawing at herself.

“Me neither.”

I began to itch too and needed only a potsherd and dungheap. Curse God, curse the nuns for arranging the dance, goddamn the little Celt-Catholic bastards, little Mediterranean lowbrow Frenchy-dago jerks. Anglo-Saxon Presbyterians would have better manners even if they didn’t believe in God.

“Why are you crying?” Moira asks me, rubbing my back briskly. She wants to get up.

“I’m not crying.”

“Your eyes are wet.”

“Tears of joy.”

But Moira, paying no attention, raises herself on one elbow to see herself in the mirror.

“Nothing is wrong with two people in love loving each other,” says Moira, turning her head to see her hair. “Buddy says that joy not guilt—”

“Buddy says!” Angrily I pull back from her. “What the hell does Buddy have to do with it?”

“All I meant was—”

“And just when did the son of a bitch say it? On just such an occasion as this?”

“At a lecture,” says Moira quickly. “Anyhow”—she levels her eyes with mine—“what makes you so different?”

“Different? What do you mean? Do you mean that you — that he—? Don’t tell me.”

“I won’t. Because it’s not true.”

But I can’t hear her for my own groaning. Why am I so jealous? It’s not that, though. It’s just that I can’t understand how Moira can hold herself so cheaply. Why doesn’t she attach the same infinite values to her favors that I do? With her I feel like a man watching a child run around with a forty-carat diamond. Her casualness with herself makes me sweat.

“It’s just that—” I begin when the knock comes at the door.

For a long moment Moira and I search each other’s eyes as if the knock came from there.

“The Bantus,” whispers Moira.

“No,” I say, but get up in some panic and disarray. Getting killed is not so bad. What is to be feared is getting killed in a bathtub like Marat.

Moira breaks for the bathroom. I finish off my toddy and brush my hair.

Comes the knock again, light knuckles on the hollow door. Somehow I know who it is the second my hand touches the doorknob.