Walker Percy - The Second Coming

Yet once he saw her at the end of a prayer meeting when everyone smiled and cried and hugged each other. She had removed her thick glasses. It made her look naked and vulnerable. She smiled and hugged and cried too. It struck a strange pang to his very heart to see her like that. For some reason, tears sprang to his eyes too. What to make of all this melting belief? Did he like her better cool and distant behind her glasses? What was wrong, he asked himself, with opening up and loving everybody? What was wrong with their loving Jesus? I don’t know. Something.

Marge Cupp cupped her hands and made swimming motions. An ex-Olympic swimmer, she was telling Jack Curl how she taught children to swim before they walked. Like many Californians, she knew how to expand the particular into the general, turn a hobby into a religion, and what’s more make it credible. It was easy to believe her and see her in the surf, a blond not-so-young Juno, waves foaming at her knees, her swim-coach tank suit well worn and dry, the hem slightly frayed over her strong dark marbled legs, launch happy babes into the Pacific, the Aquarians of a new age. Who knows? Maybe she was right: going back where we came from, back to the primal sea. That was her California principle, leaving the sad failed land life behind and leaving it soon enough and young enough before it screwed you up for good, and going back to the original environment, the ocean (which had the same salt content as blood and the amniotic fluid where we were happy), and, age ten months to ten years to a hundred, frolic like porpoises in the warm Cretaceous sea.

Jack Curl was trying to listen but he was terrified. Jump suit or no jump suit, he was terrified. Wouldn’t he have been better off rid of his genteel Virginia Episcopal tight-assed terror if Marge had got hold of him age six months and pitched him into the ocean?

Ed Cupp bunched the fingers of his left hand (which was big enough to hold a basketball from the top) and drove them up into his right. He was describing to Lewis Peckham the proper insertion of a Mercedes oil filter. There was a warranty problem with his car, whose engine had burnt up in Oklahoma City, where the Mercedes dealer had refused to honor the warranty, claiming that the oil filter had been inserted improperly. It was impossible to insert the filter improperly, said Ed Cupp, German engineering had seen to that. It was all he could think about. He too was credible. Listening to him, one shared his outrage and wished him well in his lawsuit against the Oklahoma dealer.

Leslie, leaning forward, smiling yet intense, was giving Mr. Arnold speech lessons, making a p by compressing her lips and puffing out the p against her hand, then holding her hand to Mr. Arnold’s mouth, but when he tried to say p, his slack lips blew out on the left side. Mr. Arnold looked around angrily and made motions toward his mouth. He was hungry. Leslie was angry with him.

The tree was disappearing. There was a ripple in a glass windowpane. He knew that particular ripple. Sitting in a certain chair, not reading, not talking, not listening to music, he had discovered that the ripple lined up with the far rim of the gorge so that when he moved his head a wave seemed to run along the rocky ledge.

Something was happening. Suddenly, with a little surge of satisfaction under his belt, he knew what it was. Everything had the look about it of coming to an end. There was nothing more he wished to say to the Cupps. There was nothing more for them to say to him. Things do come to an end. There was an end to this room. It was impossible for him to imagine entering this whited-out room tomorrow and lining up the ripple in the glass with the rim of the gorge. The tree was vanishing for good into the cloud.

For at least a hundred times in past years he had lined up ripple of glass with rim of gorge. A novel thought occurred to him. Sooner or later there comes along a lining up which is the last — number 101 or 102. Ordinarily one does not keep track and does not imagine that there will be a last lining up. But why not decide which lining up will be the last? Very well. This one. He lined up ripple with the beginning of the gorge rim like the two points of a gunsight and moved his eye. The ripple ran along the rim until it came to the scarlet oak which hid the target like the tree in front of the Texas Book Depository. Anyhow, the tree had almost vanished in the fog.

Suddenly he knew why he remembered the triangular patch of woods near the railroad tracks where he wanted to make love to Ethel Rosenblum. It was the very sort of place, a nondescript weedy triangular public pubic sort of place, to make a sort of love or to die a sort of death.

The silence of the cloud seemed to press in upon the house like cotton.

Did you not then believe, old mole, that these two things alone are real, loving and dying, and since one is so much like the other and there is so little of the one, in the end there remained only the other?

Silence.

Very well, old mole, you win.

6

Kitty touched him, jostled him with her hip, shoulder, elbow. She looked at him. “You look as though you just made up your mind to do something, decided what you wanted, and know just how to get it.”

“Ah.”

“What is it, Will?” She moved closer.

“Ah.”

Her eyes widened. “Is it me?”

“Ah—”

Kitty laughed, put her arm around his waist, and said she had a favor to ask of him. He smiled and nodded, noting with curiosity that everywhere she touched him a welt rose to meet her.

His body swelled. It occurred to him that it would be pleasant to take her hand and hold it against him. He turned his back on the others. But before he could take her hand, she laid both hands on him and tugged him playfully roughly into the corner beyond Marion’s Louis XV secretary. As they went past, Kitty’s hand went out to touch one of the brilliant enamel-like decoupage panels. Hand and eye made one swift appraisal. “My God, would you look at that,” she said absently to no one and in a different voice.

“Now, old dear friend Will, my first and only love. Oh, it’s so good to see you. Do you remember Central Park?”

“Yes.”

“What a dummy I was. I should have taken you up. But you were always so vague. I never knew when you were going to wander off in one of your funks.”

“Taken me up on what?” he said absently, watching the tree. The room was closed up in a cloud, a white room whited out by a white cloud, but no one seemed to notice.

“Ha ha, haa haa. Don’t give me that, son,” said Kitty, coming even closer.

“All right.”

Maybe he had “proposed” to her. In any case, he saw that Kitty had made over her past life in her head so that it became as clear and simple as a movie. He had proposed to her and she had turned him down. If she had taken him up, it was possible for her to think she would have been happy. But she hadn’t and so her life had been screwed up. If only — But even an “if only” is not so bad if it is simple. Regret can be enjoyed if it makes sense. The difference between them was that the older she got the more sense her life made. Yet she was not altogether serious in her swaying and swooping against him and her “if onlys.” The seriousness showed in her quick sure appraisal of the Louis XV secretary, the split-second touch-and-look. She knew what she wanted. What did she want from him?

The tree grew dimmer. Some of the leaves came off and blew straight up. There must be an updraft from the gorge.

“What a good-looking couple we made, Will!”

“We did?”

“Do you remember what my housemother told me at school?”

“No.”

“That you and I were not only the best-looking couple she had ever seen but the most distinguished.”