The Moviegoer

by Walker Percy

  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.”

  “What do you talk about?”

  “Everybody.”

  “Me?”

  “Why sure.”

  “What do you say?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well I can tell you one thing, son.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re surely not gon find out from me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Larroes catch medloes.”

  Out Elysian Fields we go, her warm arm lying over mine. All at once she is free with herself, flouncing around on the seat, bumping knee, hip, elbow against me. She is my date (she reminds me a little of a student nurse I once knew: she is not so starchy now but rather jolly and horsy). The MG jumps away from the stop signs like a young colt. I feel fine.

  Yes, she is on to the magic of the little car: we are earth-bound as a worm, yet we rush along at a tremendous clip between earth and sky. The heavy fragrant air pushes against us, a square hedge of pyrocantha looms dead ahead, we flash past and all of a sudden there is the Gulf, flat and sparkling away to the south.

  We are bowling along below Pass Christian when the accident happens. Just ahead of us a westbound green Ford begins a U-turn, thinks it sees nothing, creeps out and rams me square amidships. Not really hard—it makes a hollow metal bang b-rramp! and the MG shies like a spooked steer, jumps into the neutral ground, careens into a drain hole and stops, hissing. My bad shoulder has caught it. I think I pass out for a few seconds, but not before I see two things: Sharon, she is all right; and the people who hit me. It is an old couple. Ohio plates. I swear I almost recognize them. I’ve seen them in the motels by the hundreds. He is old and lean and fit, with a turkey throat and a baseball cap; she is featureless. They are on their way to Florida. He gives me a single terrified look as we buck over the grass, appeals to his wife for help, hesitates, bolts. Off he goes, bent over his wheel like a jockey.

  Sharon hovers over me. She touches my chin as if to get my attention. “Jack?”

  The pain in my shoulder was past all imagining but is already better.

  “How did you know my name was Jack?”

  “Mr Daigle and Mr Hebert call you Jack.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “You look scared.”

  “Why that crazy fool could have killed us.”

  The traffic has slowed, to feast their eyes on us. A Negro sprinkling a st
eep lawn under a summer house puts his hose down altogether and stands gaping. By virtue of our misfortune we have become a thing to look at and witnesses gaze at us with heavy-lidded almost seductive expressions. But almost at once they are past and those who follow see nothing untoward. The Negro picks up his hose. We are restored to the anonymity of our little car-space.

  Love is invincible. True, for a second or so the pain carried me beyond all considerations, even that of love, but for no more than a second. Already it has been put to work and is performing yeoman service, a lovely checker in a lovely game.

  “But what about you?” Sharon asks, coming close. “Honey, you look awful pale.”

  “He bumped my shoulder.”

  “Let me see.” She comes around and helps me take off my shirt, but the T-shirt is too high and I can’t raise my arm. “Wait.” She goes after her Guatemalan bag and finds some cuticle scissors and cuts the sleeve through the neck. I feel her stop.

  “That’s not—”

  “Not what?”

  “Not from this wreck.”

  “Sure.”

  “You got a handkerchief?” She runs down to the beach to wet it in salt water. “Now. We better find a doctor.”

  I was shot through the shoulder—a decent wound, as decent as any ever inflicted on Rory Calhoun or Tony Curtis. After all it could have been in the buttocks or genitals—or nose. Decent except that the fragment nicked the apex of my pleura and got me a collapsed lung and a big roaring empyema. No permanent damage, however, except a frightening-looking scar in the hollow of my neck and in certain weather a tender joint.

  “Come on now, son, where did you get that?” Cold water runs down my side.

  “That Ford.”

  “Why that’s terrible!”

  “Can’t you tell it’s a scar?”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “My razor slipped.”

  “Come on now!”

  “I got it on the Chongchon River.”

  “In the war?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  O Tony. O Rory. You never had it so good with direction. Nor even you Bill Holden, my noble Will. O ye morning stars together. Farewell forever, malaise. Farewell and good luck, green Ford and old Ohioan. May you live in Tampa happily and forever.

  And yet there are fellows I know who would have been sorry it happened, who would have had no thought for anything but their damned MG. Blessed MG.

  I am able to get out creakily and we sit on the grassy bank. My head spins. That son of a bitch really rocked my shoulder. The MG is not bad: a dented door.

  “And right exactly where you were sitting,” says Sharon holding the handkerchief to my shoulder. “And that old scoun’l didn’t even stop.” She squats in her black pants like a five year old and peers at me. “Goll—! Didn’t that hurt?”

  “It was the infection that was bad.”

  “I’ll tell you one dang thing.”

  “What?”

  “I surely wouldn’t want anybody shooting at me.”

  “Do you have an aspirin in your bag?”

  “Wait.”

  When she returns, she gives me the aspirin and holds my ruined shoulder in both hands, as if the aspirin were going to hurt.

  “Now look behind the seat and bring me the whisky.”

  She pours me a thumping drink into a paper cup, also from the Guatemalan bag. The aspirin goes down in the burning. I offer her the bottle.

  “I swear I believe I will.” She drinks, with hardly a face, hand pressed to the middle of her breastbone. We pull on my shirt by stages.

  But the MG! We think of her at the same time. What if she suffered a concussion? But she starts immediately, roaring her defiance of the green Ford.

  I forget my whisky bottle and when I get out to pick it up, I nearly fall down. She is right there to catch me, Rory. I put both my arms around her.

  “Come on now, son, put your weight on me.”

  “I will. You’re just about the sweetest girl I ever knew.”

  “Ne’mind that. You come on here, big buddy.”

  “I’m coming. Where’re we going?”

  “You sit over here.”

  “Can you drive?”

  “You just tell me where to go.”

  “We’ll get some beer, then go to Ship Island.”

  “In this car?”

  “In a boat.”

  “Where is it?”

  “There.” Beyond the waters of the sound stretches a long blue smudge of pines.

  The boat ride is not what I expected. I had hoped for an empty boat this time of year, a deserted deck where we might stretch out in the sun. Instead we are packed in like sardines. We find ourselves sitting bolt upright on a bench in the one little cabin surrounded by at least a hundred children. It is, we learn, a 4-H excursion from Leake County, Mississippi. A dozen men and women who look like Baptist deacons and deaconesses, red-skinned, gap-toothed, friendly—decent folk they are—are in charge. We sit drenched in the smell of upcountry Mississippi, the smell of warm white skins under boiled cotton underwear. How white they are, these farm children, milk white. No sign of sun here, no red necks; not pale are they but white, the rich damp white of skin under clothes.

  Out we go like immigrants in the hold, chuffing through the thin milky waters of Mississippi Sound.

  The only other couple on the boat is a Keesler Field airman and his girl. His fine silky hair is cropped short as ermine, but his lip is pulled up by the tendon of his nose showing two chipmunk teeth and giving him a stupid look. The girl is a plump little Mississippi armful, fifteen or sixteen; she too could be a Leake County girl. Though they sit holding hands, they could be strangers. Each stares about the cabin as if he were alone. One knows that they would dance and make love the same way, not really mindful of each other but gazing with a mild abiding astonishment at the world around. Surely I have seen them before too, at the zoo or Marineland, him gazing at the animals or fishes noting every creature with the same slow slack wonderment, her gazing at nothing in particular but not bored either, enduring rather and secure in his engrossment.

  We land near the fort, a decrepit brick silo left over from the Civil War and littered with ten summers of yellow Kodak boxes and ticket stubs and bottle caps. It is the soul of dreariness, this “historic site” washed by the thin brackish waters of Mississippi Sound. The debris of summers past piles up like archeological strata. Last summer I picked up a yellow scrap of newspaper and read of a Biloxi election in 1948, and in it I caught the smell of history far more pungently than from the metal marker telling of the French and Spanish two hundred years ago and the Yankees one hundred years ago. 1948. What a faroff time.

  A plank walk leads across some mudholes and a salt marsh to an old dance pavilion. As we pass we catch a glimpse of the airman and his girl standing bemused at a counter and drinking RC Cola. Beyond, a rise of sand and saw grass is creased by a rivulet of clear water in which swim blue crabs and cat-eye snails. Over the hillock lies the open sea. The difference is very great: first, this sleazy backwater, then the great blue ocean. The beach is clean and a big surf is rolling in; the water in the middle distance is green and lathered. You come over the hillock and your heart lifts up; your old sad music comes into the major.

  We find a hole in the rivulet and sink the cans of beer and go down the beach a ways from the children, to a tussock of sand and grass. Sharon is already in, leaving her shirt and pants on the beach like a rag. She wades out ahead of me, turning to and fro, hands outstretched to the water and sweeping it before her. Now and then she raises her hands to her head as if she were placing a crown and combs back her hair with the last two fingers. The green water foams at her knees and sucks out ankle deep and swirling with sand. Out she goes, thighs asuck, turning slowly and sweeping the water before her. How beautiful she is. She is beautiful and brave and chipper as a sparrow. My throat catches with the sadness of her beauty. Son of a bitch, it is enough to bring tears t
o your eyes. I don’t know what is wrong with me. She smiles at me, then cocks her head.

  “Why do you look at me like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, son. I’m going to give you some beer.”

  Her suit is of a black sheeny stuff like a swim-meet suit and skirtless. She comes out of the water like a spaniel, giving her head a flirt which slaps her hair around in a wet curl and stooping, brushes the water from her legs. Now she stands musing on the beach, leg locked, pelvis aslant, thumb and forefingers propped along the iliac crest and lightly, propped lightly as an athlete. As the salt water dries and stings, she minds herself, plying around the flesh of her arm and sending fingers along her back.

  Down the beach the children have been roped off into two little herds of girls and boys. They wade—evidently they can’t swim—in rough squares shepherded by the deacons who wear black bathing suits with high armholes and carry whistles around their necks. The deaconesses watch from bowers which other children are busy repairing with saw grass they have gathered from the ridge.

  We swim again and come back to the tussock and drink beer. She lies back and closes her eyes with a sigh. “This really beats typing.” Her arm falls across mine and she gives me an affectionate pat and settles herself in the sand as if she really meant to take a nap. But her eyes gleam between her eyelids and I bend to kiss her. She laughs and kisses me back with a friendly passion. We lie embracing each other.

  “Whoa now, son,” she says laughing.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Right here in front of God and everybody?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry! Listen, you come here.”

  “I’m here.”

  She makes a movement indicating both her friendliness and the limit she sets to it. For an hour we swim and drink beer. Once when she gets up, I come up on my knees and embrace her golden thighs, such a fine strapping armful they are.