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

“Good Lord, she can’t do that.”

“She’s worried about my safety.”

“We’re perfectly safe here. Besides, I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”

“It’s not exactly that. She doesn’t think it proper for me to stay here without a chaperone.”

“Good Lord, of all things to worry about now.”

“You know Aunt Ellie.”

“Yes.”

I am wondering whether to mix another gin fizz, eat, nap, or take a shower. Absently I mix a gin fizz.

“Aunt Ellie is something, isn’t she?”

“Yes, she is.”

“Do you know what she’s been telling me for as long as I can remember?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“No?”

“Here I am, twenty-four, and she still takes me aside and says: Ellen, think of yourself as a treasure trove that you’re guarding for your future husband. Can you imagine such a thing?”

“No. Yes.”

“For years I thought she was talking about Mama’s silver service locked in the linen closet.”

“Is that right?” Feeling a slight quilting of the scalp, I take an anti-hives pill. “Well, she’s right, Ellen. And I envy the lucky man.”

“Thanks, Chief.”

“This is your room, by the way.”

“What will your two girl friends say?”

I shrug. “Don’t worry about them. Now. You take your nap. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take a shower, put on some clean clothes, and eat your sandwiches. Then I think I’ll feel better.”

“I can’t stand those on you,” says Ellen, buttoning my unbuttoned collar tabs.

She lies on the bed, throwing the tufted chenille spread over her crossed ankles. How ill the chenille suits her! I blush at my summer’s effort of fitting out this room as a trysting place. How shabby Ellen makes it all seem!

Take a shower. The water is hot at first from the sun, two hundred feet of bitter hot hose water between the motel and the Esso station, then suddenly goes cold.

A harsh toweling. Switch to an Early Times today. Eat Ellen’s sandwiches? No, drink two gin fizzes.

Go fetch lapsometer, tiptoeing past Ellen, who sleeps, lips parted.

Now at the mirror, set lapsometer for a fairly stiff massage of Brodmann 11, the frontal location of the musical-erotic.

The machine sings like a tuning fork. My head sings with it, the neurones of Layer IV dancing in tune.

The albumen molecules hum.

Everybody’s talking at me,

I can’t hear a word they saying,

Only the echoes of my mind.

What does a man live for but to have a girl, use his mind, practice his trade, drink a drink, read a book, and watch the martins wing it from the Amazon and the three-fingered sassafras turn red in October?

Art Immelmann is right. Man is not made for suffering, night sweats, and morning terrors.

Doctor, heal thyself, I say, and give Brodmann 11 one last little buzz.

I feel much better, full of musical-erotic tenderness and gin fizzes and bourbon but fresh and clean and ravenous as well. I eat more of Ellen’s sandwiches.

Time to fetch Lola’s cello from the Rotary dining room.

The motel seems deserted. No activity at the church except for the carols still booming across the empty plaza:

A partridge in a pear tree …

July or not, it all comes back, the old pleasant month-long Santy-Claus-store-window Christmas. It wasn’t so bad really, the commercial Christmas, a month of Christmas Eves, stores open every night, everyone feeling good and generous and spending money freely, handsome happy Americans making the cash registers jingle, the nice commercial carols, Holy Night, the soft-eyed pretty girls everywhere—

The carol stops in mid-phrase. Someone has finally found the control panel.

The rain slams in sheets against the windows of Lola’s room. It is a small tropical storm. Lola plays a Dvořák Slavonic dance and ducks her head to its little lilt and halt and stutter and start again.

The only clean place in the room is the mattress, which has been Gulf-sprayed and spread with a fitted sheet snapped over the corners and stretched tight as a drumhead.

I lie on the drumhead sheet in my stocking feet, toddy balanced on my sternum.

Goodbye morning terror and afternoon sadness. Hello love and Anton Dvořák.

Above the racket of the storm and in the reek of warm bourbon and Gulf spray, old Dvorak sings of the sunny fields and twilit forests of Bohemia.

Lola closes her eyes as she plays. Her strong bare knees clasp the cello’s waist, her fingertips creak against the resin, her deltoid swells, the vibrato flutter of her fingering hand beats like the wings of a hawk.

Three French hens, two turtle doves

And a partridge in a pear tree,

shrieks the carillon like a wind in the storm. Some damn fool has started it up again. Lola laughs and puts the cello away.

We lie entwined on the tight sheet, kissing persimmon kisses, Lola twisting down and around in her old Juilliard torque style of kissing. When she loves, even lying down, there is a sense of her stooping to it. The cello is still but music plays on. When we’re not kissing, her tongue cleaves to the back of her teeth and she hisses cello themes in a boy’s way of whistling, a paper-boy hiss-whistling through his teeth on his route.

Her warm callused fingertips strew stars along my flank. My scalp quilts a bit, popping a hair root or two. But I can see well enough. Where are my pills?

She is both heavy and frail.

Now the idiot is fooling with the carillon controls, spinning the tape backward into fall football music. The storm roars but above it I recognize the Tarheel alma mater,

Hark the sound of Tarheel voices

Ringing clear and true,

played five years ago when Tulane played the Carolina Tarheels.

We close our eyes and go spinning back to those old haunted falls, the happy-sad bittersweet drunk Octobers. What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile. Fix me a toddy, Lola, and we’ll sit on the gallery of Tara and you play a tune and we’ll watch evening fall and lightning bugs wink in the purple meadow.

Our heads lie in each other’s arms. My hand explores the tender juncture of her frailty and strength, a piece of nature’s drollery, the flare of ribs from the massive secret paraspinal muscle columns.

“We’ll live at Tara,” says Lola past my arm in the prosaic casting-ahead voice of a woman planning tomorrow’s meals. “While I’m showing horses and playing concerts, you can do your researches. You can have the garçonnière for your laboratory.”

Lying cheek against the warm slump of her biceps, I am perceiving myself as she sees me, an agreeable H. G. Wells nineteenth-century scientist type, “doing my researches” in the handsome outhouse of Tara, maybe working on a time machine and forgetting time the way great inventors do as she has to remind me to eat, bringing a tray of collard greens and corn bread to the lab. “Darling, you haven’t eaten all day!” So I take time off to eat, time off from my second breakthrough and my second Nobel.

Afterwards we sit on the gallery and Lola brings me toddies and plays happy old Haydn, whose music does not brook one single shadow of sadness.

Then we’ll go to bed, not in the bunker to watch the constellations spin in their courses but upstairs to the great four-poster, the same used by Rhett Butler and Scarlett and purchased by Vince Marsaglia at the M-G-M prop sale in 1970.