Walker Percy - The Moviegoer

A very good phrase. I have to admire the St Louisan for his neat and well-ordered life, his gold pencil and his scissors-knife and his way of clipping articles on the convergence of the physical sciences and the social sciences; it comes over me that in the past few days my own life has gone to seed. I no longer eat and sleep regularly or write philosophical notes in my notebook and my fingernails are dirty. The search has spoiled the pleasure of my tidy and ingenious life in Gentilly. As late as a week ago, such a phrase as “hopefully awaiting the gradual convergence of the physical sciences and the social sciences” would have provoked no more than an ironic tingle or two at the back of my neck. Now it howls through the Ponchitoula Swamp, the very sound and soul of despair.

Kate has stopped shivering and when she lights up and starts smoking, I am certain she is better. But I am mistaken. “Oooh,” she says in a perfunctory workaday voice and starts forward again. The car lurches and throws her against Sidney’s chair; there the train holds her fast: for three seconds she might be taken for a rapt onlooker of the gin-rummy game. Sidney rocks the deck against the polished wood until the cards are perfectly aligned. The gold ring on his little finger seems to serve as a device, a neat little fastening by means of which his hand movements are harnessed and made trim.

Half an hour passes and Kate does not return. I find her in her roomette, arms folded and face turned to the dark glass. We sit knee to knee.

“Are you all right?”

She nods slowly to the window, but her cheek is against me. Outside a square of yellow light flees along an embankment, falls away to the woods and fields, comes roaring back good as new. Suddenly a perky head pops up. Kate is leaning forward hugging herself.

“I am all right. I am never too bad with you.”

“Why?”

“No thanks to you. On the contrary. The others are much more sympathetic than you, especially Mother and Sam.”

“What about Merle?”

“Merle! Listen, with Merle I could break wind and he would give me that same quick congratulatory look. But you. You’re nuttier than I am. One look at you and I have to laugh. Do you think that is sufficient ground for marriage?”

“As good as any. Better than love.”

“Love! What do you know about love?”

“I didn’t say I knew anything about it.”

She is back at her window, moving her hand to see it move in the flying yellow square. We hunch up knee to knee and nose to nose like the two devils on the Rorschach card. Something glitters in the corner of her eye. Surely not a tear.

“Quite a Carnival. Two proposals in one Mardi Gras.”

“Who else?”

“Sam.”

“No kidding.”

“No kidding. And I’ll tell you something else. Sam is quite a person behind that façade. An essentially lonely person.”

“I know.”

“You’re worse than Sam.” She is angry.

“How?”

“Sam is a schemer. He also likes me. He knows that someday I will be quite rich. But he also likes me. That isn’t so bad. Scheming is human. You have to be human to be a schemer. Whenever I see through one of Sam’s little schemes, I feel a sensation of warmth. Ah ha, think I to myself, so it must have been in the world once — men and women wanting something badly and scheming away like beavers. But you—”

“Yes?”

“You’re like me. So let us not deceive one another.”

Her voice is steadier. Perhaps it is the gentle motion of the train with which we nod ever so slightly, yes, yes, yes.

She says: “Can’t you see that for us it is much too late for such ingenious little schemes?”

“As marrying?”

“The only way you could carry it off is as another one of your ingenious little researches. Admit it.”

“Then why not do it?”

“You remind me of a prisoner in the death house who takes a wry pleasure in doing things like registering to vote. Come to think of it, all your gaiety and good spirits have the same death house quality. No thanks. I’ve had enough of your death house pranks.”

“What is there to lose?”

“Can’t you see that after what happened last night, it is no use. I can’t play games now. But don’t you worry. I’m not going to swallow all the pills at once. Losing hope is not so bad. There’s something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.”

“Very well. Lose hope or not. Be afraid or not. But marry me anyhow, and we can still walk abroad on a summer night, hope or no hope, shivering or not, and see a show and eat some oysters down on Magazine.”

“No no.”

“I don’t understand—”

“You’re right. You don’t understand. It is not some one thing, as you think. It is everything. It is all so monstrous.”

“What is monstrous?”

“I told you,” she says irritably. “Everything. I’m not up to it. Having a little hubby — you would be hubby, dearest Binx, and that is ridiculous — did I hurt your feelings? Seeing hubby off in the morning, having lunch with the girls, getting tight at Eddie’s and Nell’s house and having a little humbug with somebody else’s hubby, wearing my little diaphragm and raising my two lovely boys and worrying for the next twenty years about whether they will make Princeton.”

“I told you we would live in Gentilly. Or Modesto.”

“I was being ingenious like you.”

“Do you want to live like Sam and Joel?”

“Binx Binx. You’re just like your aunt. When I told her how I felt, she said to me: Katherine, you’re perfectly right. Don’t ever lose your ideals and your enthusiasm for ideas — she thought I was talking about something literary or political or Great Books, for God’s sake. I thought to myself: is that what I’m doing? — and ran out and took four pills. Incidentally they’re all wrong about that. They all think any minute I’m going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I’m as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself — ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide. And that reminds me.” And off she goes down the steel corridor, one hand held palm out to the wall.

None of this is new, of course. I do not, to tell the truth, pay too much attention to what she says. It is her voice that tells me how she is. Now she speaks in her “bold” tone and since she appears more composed, to the point of being cheerful, than her words might indicate, I am not seriously concerned about her.

But the roomette soon becomes suffocating and, not feeling up to talking business with Sidney Gross, I head in the opposite direction, stop in the first vestibule and have a long drink from my Mardi Gras bottle. We must be pulling into Jackson. The train screeches slowly around a curve and through the back of town. Kate comes out and stands beside me without a word. She smells of soap and seems in vaulting good spirits.

“Have a drink?”

“Do you remember going up to Baton Rouge on the train to see the football games?”

“Sure.” Balancing there, her oval face aglow in the dark vestibule, hair combed flat on her head and down into the collar of her suit, she looks like a college girl. She drinks, pressing fingers to her throat. “Lord, how beautiful.”

The train has stopped and our car stands high in the air, squarely above a city street. The nearly full moon swims through streaming ragtags of cloud and sheds a brilliant light on the Capitol dome and the spanking new glass-and-steel office buildings and the empty street with its glittering streetcar track. Not a soul is in sight. Far away, beyond the wings of the Capitol building stretch the dark tree-covered hills and the twinkling lights of the town. By some trick of moonlight the city seems white as snow and never-tenanted; it sleeps away on its hilltop like the holy city of Zion.