by Walker Percy
Moira comes out wound up in a towel, rubbing her short blond hair with another towel.
“Feel me.”
The flesh of her arm is cold-warm, the blood warmth just palpable through her cold smooth skin.
“Let me get up to take a shower.” Moira is sitting in my lap. She won’t get up so I get up with her and walk around holding her in my arms like a child.”
“Don’t,” says Moira.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t take a shower.”
“Why not?”
“I like the way you smell. You smell like Uncle Bud.”
“Who is Uncle Bud?”
“He had a chicken farm out from Parkersburg. I used to go see him Sunday mornings and sit in his lap while he read me the funnies. He always smelled like whiskey and sweat and seersucker.”
“Do I look like Uncle Bud?”
“No, you look like Rod McKuen.”
“He’s rather old.”
“But you both look poetic.”
“I brought along his poems for you.”
“Which ones?”
“The ones about sea gulls.”
“You’ve thought of everything.”
“You’re a lovely girl,” I say, holding and patting her just as I used to pat Samantha when she had growing pains.
“Do you love me?”
“Oh yes.”
“How much?”
“Enough to eat you,” I say and begin to eat her kneecap.
“Enough to marry me?”
“What?”
“Do you love me enough to marry me?”
“Oh yes.”
“Do you know what I’ve always wanted?”
“No.”
“To keep some chickens.”
“All right.”
“Golden banties. You know what?”
“What?”
“That work at the clinic is a lot of bull. I’d love to stay home raising golden banties while you are doing your famous researches.”
“All right.” I suck the cold-warm flesh of her forearm covered by long whorled down. The fine hair rises to my mouth and makes a skein like the tiny ropes that bound Gulliver.
“Could we live in Paradise?”
“Certainly.”
Eating her, I have visions of golden cockerels glittering like topazes in the morning sun in my “enclosed patio.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“When will we do that?”
“Whenever you like,” I say, marveling at her big littleness. My arms gauge a secret amplitude in her. She is small and heavy.
“No really. When?”
“When we leave here.”
“When will that be?”
“A week, a month. Perhaps longer.”
“My Lord,” says Moira, straightening in my arms like a child wanting to be put down. “What do you mean?”
“I’m afraid something is going to happen today, in fact is happening now, which will make it impossible for us to leave here for a while. At least until I make sure it’s safe for us either in Paradise or the Center.”
“What do you mean? When I left there this morning, the place was dead as a doornail.”
“For one thing a revolution may have occurred. There is a report that guerrillas from Honey Island are in Paradise. I fear too that there may be disorders today at the political rally near Fedville.”
“You don’t have to go to this much trouble to keep me here, you know.”
“Let me show you something.”
I carry her to the window, where she pulls back the curtain. Five columns of smoke come from the green ridge above the orange tiles of the ice-cream restaurant.
“There was only one fire when I was there earlier.”
“What does that mean?”
“They’re burning the houses on the old 18.”
“O my Lord.”
“But that’s not the worst. I’m afraid my invention has fallen into the wrong hands.”
“What does that mean?”
“Two things. Civil war and a chain reaction in the Heavy Sodium deposits.”
“But I can’t stay here.” Moira straightens in my arms again.
“Why not?”
“I don’t have anything to wear! All I have is the clothes on my back—the clothes in there, that is.”
“Let me show you something else. Open the top drawer.”
She opens it. “What in the world?” The top drawer has underclothes, blouses, slips. The other drawers have skirts, dresses, shorts, etcetera.
“Whose are they?” asks Moira, frowning.
“Yours.”
“Were they your wife’s?”
“No. She’d make two of you.”
“Gollee.” Moira gets down, opens the bottom drawer, sits drumming her fingers on the Gideon. “And what are we going to live on? Love?”
“Let me show you.”
I take her to the closet. She gazes at the crates and cartons stacked to the ceiling, cartons of Campbell’s chicken-and-rice, Underwood ham, Sunmaid raisins, cases of Early Times and Swiss Colony sherry (which Moira likes). And the Great Books stacked alongside.
“That’s enough for a small army.”
“Or for two people for a long time.”
“Who’s going to read all those books?”
“Well read them aloud to each other.”
Think of it: reading Aeschylus, in the early fall, in old Howard Johnson’s, off old I-11, with Moira.
“What about Rod McKuen?”
“He’s over there. Under the Gideon.”
“There’s no pots and pans,” says Moira suddenly.
“The kitchenette’s next door.”
“Good night, nurse.”
“Let me show you something else.” We sit on the bed. “Put this quarter in the slot there.”
The Slepe-Eze starts up and sets the springs gently vibrating.
“Oh no!” Moira’s eyes round. “I guess they had to have this.”
“They?”
“The salesmen.”
“Yes.”
“Those poor lonely men. Think of it.”
“Yes.”
“Making love and dying in a place like this, far from home.”
“Dying?”
“The Death of a Salesman.”
“Right. Come sit in Uncle Bud’s lap.”
“All right. Honey?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s have children.”
“All right.” How odd. The idea of Moira and me having a child is the oddest thing in the world. But why? “First, let’s fix us a drink.”
“All right.”
She sits in my lap and we drink. She insists on whiskey rather than her sherry since that was what the flappers and salesmen drank.
“This beats Knott’s Berry Farm,” she whispers.
“Yes.”
One difference between Moira and my wife, Doris, is that Doris liked motels that were in the middle of nowhere, at the intersection of I-89 and I-23 in the Montana badlands. While Moira likes a motel near a point of interest such as Seven Flags over Texas.
Now we lie in one another’s arms on the humming bed. She is as trim and quick as one of her banty hens. She’s a West Virginia tomboy brown as a berry and strong-armed and -legged from climbing trees.
Cold fogs of air blow over us, Mantovani plays Jerome Kern. “I love classical music,” whispers Moira. The Laughing Cavalier smiles down on us, hundreds of Maryland hunters leap the same fence around the walls.
Locked about one another we go spinning down old Louisiana misty green, slowly revolving and sailing down the summer wind. How prodigal is she with and how little store she sets by her perfectly formed Draw-Me arms and legs.
Now she lies in the crook of my arm, eyes open, tapping her hard little fingernail on her tooth. Her little mind ranges far and wide. She casts ahead, making plans, no doubt, doing my living room over. I took her there once and it was a
n unhappy business, she keeping her head down and looking up through her eyebrows at Doris’s great abstract enamels that went leaping around the walls like the seven souls of Shiva.
“Do you like my hair long?”
“Do you call it long now?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
When my daughter, Samantha, was a freshman in high school, she had her first date, a blind one for the Introductory Prom, the boys from Saint Aloysius drawing the Saint Mary’s girls from a hat. Samantha and I sat waiting for the date, I with my instructions not to open the front door until she had a chance to leave the room so that she could then be a little late, she with her blue pinafore skirt tucked under her fat knees. We watched Gunsmoke as we waited. The boy didn’t come. Gunsmoke gave way to the Miss America pageant. Bert Parks went nimbly back-stepping around snaking the mike cord out of his way. Samantha’s acne began to itch.
“I wouldn’t have missed this, Poppa,” said Samantha as we watched Miss Nebraska recite “If” in the talent contest. But she was clawing at herself.
“Me neither.”
I began to itch too and needed only a potsherd and dungheap. Curse God, curse the nuns for arranging the dance, goddamn the little Celt-Catholic bastards, little Mediterranean lowbrow Frenchy-dago jerks. Anglo-Saxon Presbyterians would have better manners even if they didn’t believe in God.
“Why are you crying?” Moira asks me, rubbing my back briskly. She wants to get up.
“I’m not crying.”
“Your eyes are wet.”
“Tears of joy.”
But Moira, paying no attention, raises herself on one elbow to see herself in the mirror.
“Nothing is wrong with two people in love loving each other,” says Moira, turning her head to see her hair. “Buddy says that joy not guilt—”
“Buddy says!” Angrily I pull back from her. “What the hell does Buddy have to do with it?”
“All I meant was—”
“And just when did the son of a bitch say it? On just such an occasion as this?”
“At a lecture,” says Moira quickly. “Anyhow”—she levels her eyes with mine—“what makes you so different?”
“Different? What do you mean? Do you mean that you —that he—? Don’t tell me.”
“I won’t. Because it’s not true.”
But I can’t hear her for my own groaning. Why am I so jealous? It’s not that, though. It’s just that I can’t understand how Moira can hold herself so cheaply. Why doesn’t she attach the same infinite values to her favors that I do? With her I feel like a man watching a child run around with a forty-carat diamond. Her casualness with herself makes me sweat.
“It’s just that—” I begin when the knock comes at the door.
For a long moment Moira and I search each other’s eyes as if the knock came from there.
“The Bantus,” whispers Moira.
“No,” I say, but get up in some panic and disarray. Getting killed is not so bad. What is to be feared is getting killed in a bathtub like Marat.
Moira breaks for the bathroom. I finish off my toddy and brush my hair.
Comes the knock again, light knuckles on the hollow door. Somehow I know who it is the second my hand touches the doorknob.
It is Ellen, of course, in uniform, with the wind up, color high in her cheeks, head reared a little so that the curve of her cheek narrows her eyes, which are icy-Lake-Geneva blue. It is hotter than ever, but a purple thunderhead towers behind her. Her uniform is crisp. The only sign of the heat is the sparkle of perspiration in the dark down of her lip.
“Come in come in come in.”
She’s all business and a-bustle, starch whistling as if she were paying a house call. When she sets down her bag, I notice her hands are trembling.
“What’s the matter?”
“Somebody shot at me,” she says, leafing nervously through the Gideon, unseeing.
“Where?”
“Coming past the church.”
“Maybe it was firecrackers.”
She slams the Bible shut “Why didn’t you answer the Anser-Phone?”
“I guess I turned it off.”
Ellen, still blinded by the sunlight, gazes uncertainly at the dim fogbanks rolling around the room. I guide her to the foot of the bed. I sit on the opposite bed.
“Chief, I think you better come back to the office.”
“Why?”
“Dr. Immelman found the box of lapsometers.”
“I know.”
“You know? How?”
“Moira told me she saw him.”
“Oh. Chief, he’s been handing them out to people.”
“What sort of people?”
“Some very strange people.”
“Yes, hm.” I am eyeing the dressing room nervously. Moira is stirring about but Ellen pays no attention.
“I heard him send one man to NASA, another to Boeing.”
“It sounds serious.”
“When the fight started, I left.”
“What fight?”
“Between Mr. Tennis and Mr. Ledbetter.”
“Is that Ted Tennis, Chico?” cries Moira, bursting out of the dressing room. “Oh hello there!” She smiles brilliantly at Ellen and strides about the room, hands thrust deep in the pockets of the blue linen long-shorts I bought for her. They fit. “These really fit, Chico,” she says, wheeling about.
Chico? Where did she get that? Then I remember. When we stayed in the small hotel with the wishing well in Merida, she called me Chico a couple of times.
“Yes. Ah, do you girls know each other?”
“Oh yes!”
“Yes indeed!”
Ellen then goes on talking to me as if Moira had not come in.
“And that’s not the worst, Chief.”
“It isn’t?”
Ellen and I are still sitting at the foot of separate beds. Moira stretches out behind me. Both girls are making me nervous.
“I heard him tell the same two men that five o’clock was the deadline.”
“Deadline?”
“I didn’t know what he meant either. When I asked him, he said that was the time when we’d know which way our great experiment would go. What did he mean by that?”
“I’m not sure.”
“He said you’d know. He said if worst came to worst, you had the means of protecting us and that you would know what he meant.”
“I see.”
“What do you suppose that means, Chico?” asks Moira, giving me a nudge in the back with her toe. I wish she wouldn’t do that. “Is that why we have to stay here?”
“Ahem, it may have something to do with that.”
“Give me a quarter.”
“O.K.,” I say absently.
Moira puts the quarter into the slot. The Slepe-Eze begins to vibrate under me. I jump up.
Ellen manages to ignore the vibrating bed.
“Chief, he said you would know what to look for at five o’clock.”
“Right,” I say eagerly. The prospect of a catastrophe is welcome. “Three things are possible: a guerrilla attack, a chain reaction, and a political disturbance at the speech-making.”
“Pshaw,” says Moira, gazing at the ceiling. “I don’t think anything is going to happen. Idle rumors.”
My eyes roll up. Never in her life has Moira said pshaw before—pronounced with a p. She read it somewhere.
“That was no rumor that took a shot at me,” says Ellen, looking at me blinkered as if I had said it. She hasn’t yet looked at Moira.
“I imagine not,” I say, frowning. I wish the mattress would stop vibrating. I find myself headed for the door. “I better take a look around. I’ll bring y’all a Dr. Pepper.”
“Wait, Chico.” Moira takes my hand. “I’ll go with you. Don’t forget you promised me a tour of the ruins, the ice-cream parlor, the convention room where all the salesmen used to glad-hand each other.” She swings around. “It’s been nice seeing you again, Miss Ah—
”
“I’ll be running on,” says Ellen, reaching the door ahead of us.
“No, Ellen.” I take her arm. “I’m afraid you can’t leave.”
“Why not?”
“I want to make sure the coast is clear.”
“Very well, Chief.”
To my surprise, Ellen shrugs and perches herself—on the still-humming bed!
“You want to come with us?”
“No no. You kids run along. I’ll hold the fort. I see you have food. I’ll fix some sandwiches while you’re gone.”
“Let me show you where everything is, honey,” says Moira. The two huddle over the picnic basket.
Oh, they’re grand girls, though. Whew. What a relief to see them get along! There’s no sight more reassuring than two women working over food. Women needn’t be catty! Perhaps we three could be happy here.
“We’ll be back, Ellen!” cries Moira, yanking me after her. “If things get slow, there’s always the Gideon.”
Now why did she have to say that?
“You mean you didn’t bring your manual from Love?” laughs Ellen, waving us on our way.
“Ha ha, very good, girls,” I say, laughing immoderately. They are great girls, though. Whew. A relief nevertheless to close the door between the two of them and be on our way.
3
Moira was never more loving or lovable. By turns playful, affectionate, mournful, prattling, hushed, she darts ahead like a honeybee tasting the modest delights of this modest ruin.
“Do you think there’s any danger, Chico?” she calls back.
“I doubt if there’s anyone around.”
“What about Ellen’s sniper?”
“Well—”
“She spooks easy, huh?”
“No. On the contrary.”
“Do you like her?”
“She’s a fine nurse.”
“But do you like her?”
“Like?”
“Or as you say, fancy.”
“No. I fancy you.”
We’re behind the registration desk reading the names of long-departed guests, not salesmen, I notice, but families, mom and pop and the kids bound for the Gulf Coast or the Smokies or Seven Flags.
Now we’re under the moldering Rotary banner in the dark banquet room arm in arm and as silent as we were last summer at Ghost Town, U.S.A. Moira reads the banner.
