Walker Percy - The Moviegoer

“Do you want to go home and let me pick you up in half an hour? Put your suit on under your clothes.”

“All right!” But it isn’t all right. Her voice is a little too bright.

“Meanwhile I’ll go get my car and my suit.”

“All right.” She is openly grudging. It is not right at all! She is just like Linda.

“I have a better idea. Come on and walk home with me to get my car and then I’ll take you to your house.”

“All right.” A much better all right. “Now you wait right here. This won’t take me long.”

When she comes out, her eyes are snapping.

“Is everything all right?”

“You mighty right it is”—eyes flashing, Uh oh. The boy friend has torn it.

“I hope you brought your suit down from Eufala.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Why no.”

“It’s some suit. Just an old piece of a suit. I was going to get me one at Maison Blanche but I didn’t think I’d be going swimming in March.”

“Do you like to swim?”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“I’d rather swim than eat. I really would. Where’re we going?”

“To the ocean.”

“The ocean! I never knew there was an ocean anywhere around here.”

“It’s the open Gulf. The same thing.”

When I put her in the car, she addresses an imaginary third person. “Now this is what I call real service. Your boss not only lets you off to go swimming — he takes you to the beach.”

On these terms we set forth: she the girl whose heart’s desire is to swim; I, her generous employer, who is nice enough to provide transportation.

Early afternoon finds us spinning along the Gulf Coast. Things have not gone too badly. As luck would have it, no sooner do we cross Bay St Louis and reach the beach drive than we are involved in an accident. Fortunately it is not serious. When I say as luck would have it, I mean good luck. Yet how, you might wonder, can even a minor accident be considered good luck?

Because it provides a means of winning out over the malaise, if one has the sense to take advantage of it.

What is the malaise? you ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost.

You say it is a simple thing surely, all gain and no loss, to pick up a good-looking woman and head for the beach on the first fine day of the year. So say the newspaper poets. Well it is not such a simple thing and if you have ever done it, you know it isn’t — unless, of course, the woman happens to be your wife or some other everyday creature so familiar to you that she is as invisible as you yourself. Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.

The car itself is all-important, I have discovered. When I first moved to Gentilly, I bought a new Dodge sedan, a Red Ram Six. It was a comfortable, conservative and economical two-door sedan, just the thing, it seemed to me, for a young Gentilly businessman. When I first slid under the wheel to drive it, it seemed that everything was in order — here was I, a healthy young man, a veteran with all his papers in order, a U.S. citizen driving a very good car. All these things were true enough, yet on my first trip to the Gulf Coast with Marcia, I discovered to my dismay that my fine new Dodge was a regular incubator of malaise. Though it was comfortable enough, though it ran like a clock, though we went spinning along in perfect comfort and with a perfect view of the scenery like the American couple in the Dodge ad, the malaise quickly became suffocating. We sat frozen in a gelid amiability. Our cheeks ached from smiling. Either would have died for the other. In despair I put my hand under her dress, but even such a homely little gesture as that was received with the same fearful politeness. I longed to stop the car and bang my head against the curb. We were free, moreover, to do that or anything else, but instead on we rushed, a little vortex of despair moving through the world like the still eye of a hurricane. As it turned out, I should have stopped and banged my head, for Marcia and I returned to New Orleans defeated by the malaise. It was weeks before we ventured out again.

This is the reason I have no use for cars and prefer buses and streetcars. If I were a Christian I would make a pilgrimage by foot, for this is the best way to travel. But girls do not like it. My little red MG, however, is an exception to the rule. It is a miserable vehicle actually, with not a single virtue save one: it is immune to the malaise. You have no idea what happiness Marcia and I experienced as soon as we found ourselves spinning along the highway in this bright little beetle. We looked at each other in astonishment: the malaise was gone! We sat out in the world, out in the thick summer air between sky and earth. The noise was deafening, the wind was like a hurricane; straight ahead the grains of the concrete rushed at us like mountains.

It was nevertheless with some apprehension that I set out with Sharon. What if the malaise had been abated simply by the novelty of the MG? For by now the MG was no novelty. What if the malaise was different with every girl and needed a different cure? One thing was certain. Here was the acid test. For the stakes were very high. Either very great happiness lay in store for us, or malaise past all conceiving. Marcia and Linda were as nothing to this elfin creature, this sumptuous elf from Eufala who moved like a ballerina, hard-working and docile, dreaming in her work, head to the side, cheek downy and spare as a boy’s. With her in the bucket seat beside me I spin along the precipice with the blackest malaise below and the greenest of valleys ahead. One great advantage is mine: her boy friend, the Faubourg Marigny character. The fellow has no better sense than to make demands on her and she has no use for him. Thank God for the macaroni.

Indeed as we pass through the burning swamps of Chef Menteur, it seems to me that I catch a whiff of the malaise. A little tongue of hellfire licks at our heels and the MG jumps ahead, roaring like a bomber through the sandy pine barrens and across Bay St Louis. Sharon sits smiling and silent, her eyes all but closed against the wind, her big golden knees doubled up against the dashboard. “I swear, this is the cutest little car I ever saw!” she yelled at me a minute ago.

By some schedule of proprieties known to her, she did not become my date until she left her rooming house where she put on a boy’s shirt and black knee britches. Her roommate watched us from an upper window. “Wave to Joyce,” Sharon commands me. Joyce is leaning on the sill, a brown-haired girl in a leather jacket. She has the voluptuous look of roommates left alone. It becomes necessary to look a third time. Joyce shifts her weight and beyond any doubt a noble young ham hikes up under the buckskin. A sadness overtakes me. If only — If only what? If only I could send Sharon on her way and go straight upstairs and see Joyce, a total stranger? Yes. But not quite. If only I could be with both of them, with a house full of them, an old Esplanade rooming house full of strapping American girls with their silly turned heads and their fine big bottoms. In the last split second I could swear Joyce knows what I am thinking, for she gives me a laughing naughty-you look and her mouth forms oh -ho! Sharon comes piling into the car and up against me. Now she can touch me.

“Where is Joyce from?”

“Illinois.”

“Is she nice?”

“Joyce is a good old girl.”

“She seems to be. Are you all good friends?”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“Lordy lord, the crazy talks we have. If people could hear us, they would carry us straight to Tuscaloosa.”