by Walker Percy
“I think I’ll have a drink.”
“From the bottle?”
“Yes. If you like I’ll get you some ice water.”
When I finished, she upped the bottle, looking around all the while. She swallowed, bright-eyed. “Do you do this every day?”
“I usually take a bath first, then sit on the gallery and Elgin brings me some ice water.”
“Well, this is nice too.”
We drank again in silence. It was raining hard and we couldn’t hear the pigeons. The tour buses were turning around, cutting up the lawn, sliding in the mud, their transmissions whining.
“Do you have to go back with them?”
“I’d as soon stay. Do you live here alone?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not married?”
“No. I was. My wife’s dead. I have a son and daughter, but they’re off at school.”
“I thought Mr. and Mrs. Lamar were husband and wife.”
“No, son and mother. But my mother died last year.”
“And you’re here alone?”
“Yes.”
“All by yourself?”
“Except for my son and daughter, but they’re seldom here.”
“I’d be here all the time!” she cried, looking around.
“I am.”
“I see,” she said not listening, but looking, not missing a trick. She did see, she never stopped seeing. “What a lovely studio apartment this would make. And the little iron spiral staircase. Priceless! Do you know what this would rent for in New Orleans?”
“No.”
“Two fifty at least.”
“I could use it.”
“You mean you don’t do all this”—she nodded toward the buses, now moving out in a slow caravan—“just to show your beautiful house?”
“I do it to make money. I don’t like to show my beautiful house.”
“Mmmm.” What I didn’t know at the time was how directly her mind worked. What she was thinking was: I have ten million dollars and you don’t; you have a great house and I don’t; you have a name and I don’t; but you don’t have me. You are a solitary sort and don’t think much about women but now you do. “Feel how cold I am.”
“All right.”
She took my hand and put it on her bare shoulder. Her flesh was firm and cool but there was a warmth under the cool.
“You’ve got a big hand. Look how small it makes mine look.” She measured our hands, palm to palm.
“It’s not all that small.”
“No, it’s not. Hoo hoo! Haw haw!” she guffawed. “You could put a bathroom there.” She pointed both our hands toward a closet of flower pots. “A kitchenette there. Bedroom up there. Think of it! I saw Beauvoir last week. Jeff Davis had a place like this. Let me fix it up for you.”
“All right.”
“What a cunning little place!” Cunning. Where did she get that? Not Odessa. I hadn’t heard it for years. That’s what my mother’s generation said, meaning cute, adorable, charming. Margot herself, not really a good actress, nevertheless had a good ear. She could have listened to my mother for five minutes, ear cocked, and made cunning her own. “I’d put a planter there, use an old stained-glass door, hang my Utrillos there.”
“Real Utrillos?’
She nodded absently. “Those walls!” She was taking in the famous octagon angles.
We were drinking all the while. She drank from the fifth as easily as if it were a Coke, using her tongue to measure and stop the flow. It had stopped raining. The sun broke out over the levee and the room glowed with a warm rosy light from the slave bricks. Outside, little frogs began to peep in the ditches.
“Couldn’t we get more comfortable? I’m totaled.” She simply lay down on the glider mattress, propping her head on one hand. “No pillow?”
The nearest thing to a pillow I could find was a foam-rubber cylinder, a boat fender. We took another drink. She patted the mattress. Such was the dimension of mattress and pillow that the only way we could use them was to lie close facing each other.
The sun came out before it set. We lay together in the rosy dusk, heads propped on the boat fender, which seemed to have a thrust of its own. There was nowhere to put my arm but across her waist. Below it, her pantalooned hip rose like a wave.
“You’re very sexy in seersuckers,” she said, absent-mindedly drumming her fingers on my hip. She was a little drunk but also a little preoccupied. It was strange, but lying with her I became conscious of myself, my own body stirring against the hot crinkled fabric.
I kissed her. Or rather our mouths came together because they had no other place to go. As we kissed, the sunny bourbon on our lips, her wide mouth opened and bade me enter, welcoming me like a new home. It was her head which came around, up and over onto mine. My hot sweated seersucker commingled with her orris root and rained-on flesh and damp crinoline. Outside in the ditches the rain frogs had found their voices and were peeping in chorus. Her fine leg, pantalooned and harlequined—not quite genuine belle was she but more Texan come to Mardi Gras—rose, levitated, and crossed over my body. There it lay sweet and heavy.
We laughed with the joy of the place and being there, and drank and kissed and I felt the deep runnel of her back above her pantaloons.
“Does the door lock?” she asked.
“It’s not necessary, but if it will make you feel better.” I got up and locked the door, turning an eight-inch iron key and driving a dead bolt home with a clack.
“My God, it sounds like the dungeon at Chillon. Let me see that key.”
I lay down and gave her the iron key. She held it in one hand and me in the other and was equally fond of both. She liked antiques and making love. As she examined it, she imprisoned me with her sweet heavy thigh as if she had to keep me still while she calculated the value of the iron key. I had to laugh out loud. I was just getting onto her drollness and directness. She might just as well have said: I’ve got something sweet for you, old boy, the sweetest something you’ll ever have but hold it a minute while I look at this old key. She had a passion for old “authentic” things. Texas must have everything but old things.
She was right, she had something sweet and she knew as only a woman can know, with absolute certitude, that she had me, that through some odd coming together of time and place and circumstance and her equally odd mixture of calculation, drollness, and her cool-fleshed hot like of me—oh yes, she wanted me as well as my house—she infallibly knew where the vector of desire converged, the warm cottoned-off place between her legs, the sheer negativity and want and lack where the well-fitted cotton dipped and went away. I kissed the cotton there.
We drank and laughed at the joy of the time and the discovery: that we each had what the other wanted, not exactly “love” as the word is used, but her new ten million and my old house, her sweet West Texas self and my just as sweet Louisiana Anglo-Saxon aristocracy gone to pot, well-born English lord Sterling Hayden gone to seed in Macao. It was like a rare royal betrothal, where the betrothed like each other as well. Like? Love. Laugh and shout with joy at the happiness between them.
Her calculation and cool casting ahead delighted me. As her thigh lay across me, it seemed to be sentient of itself, assigned as it was the task of fathoming the life beneath it, and even as we kissed her eyes were agleam and not quite closed as she took in the pigeonnier. big enough for a thousand pigeons or one man. An “architectural gem” she called it.
But what is love? I thought even then. For by your dear sweet Jesus I did love her there for her droll mercinariness and between her sweet legs and in her mouth and her splendid deep strong runneled back sinking dizzily into a narrow solid waist before it flared into the loveliest ass in all West Texas, but loved as well her droll direct Texas way and even her quickness in overlaying it with Dallas acting-school lingo. New Orleans uptown talk, and God knew what else.
At heart she was a collector, preserver, restorer, transformer; even me and herself she transformed: to take
an old neglected abused thing, save it, restore it, put it to new and charming use. She loved to drink, laugh, and make love, but almost as well, better maybe, and orgasmically too, she liked cleaning away a hundred years of pigeon shit and finding lovely oiled-with-guano cypress underneath, turning a dovecote into a study, me into Jefferson Davis writing his memoirs. She was a Texas magician.
It was different from being “in love.” I was “in love” with Lucy Cobb, my first wife.
The first time I saw Lucy Cobb: on the tennis court at Highlands, North Carolina, I the Louisiana outlander and ill-at-ease among the easy ingrown Georgians and Carolinians, not knowing them or quite how to dress and so dressed up wrong in coat and tie in late afternoon and standing off a ways under a tree, hands in pockets watching the tennis players, and thinking despite myself: What a shame you all don’t know who I am, for in Louisiana people would, Louisiana being what it is, a small American Creole republic valuing sports, fistfights, cockfights, contests, shootouts, Gunsmoke. winning, and above all, football, and there I was in what turned out to be the high tide of my life what with being chosen Athlete of the Year by Y.M.B.C. and Rhodes scholar besides, like Whizzer White, which latter contributed nothing to my fame except a storied exotic detail (“… and he’s smart too!”)—the South a very big place after all and the rough camaraderie of Louisiana not necessarily working here in the muted manners of the east South, where people seemed to come and go, meet and part by agreed-upon but unspoken rules. I was famous in Louisiana, as famous as the Governor, and for one reason alone: running 110 yards against mighty Alabama, and unknown in Carolina.
Lucy’s smooth thin brown legs scissored and flashed under her white skirt. When she hit the ball, she got her body into it, shoulders, back, and even a final flex of pelvis. She must have played tennis all her life. Decorous as she stood talking, lounged at the net, laughed, spun her racket, eyes cast down, when she served, her body arched back, then in full reach stretched, then flexed and swung in mock-erotic abandon. Served to, she waited in an easy crouch, shifting her weight to and fro.
What I see even now when I think of her is the way she picked up the ball or rather did not pick it up but toed it onto her racket in a cunning little turning in of her white-shod foot. No, not thin was she but slim, because her joints, ankle, wrist, elbow did not show bone but were a simple articulation.
Her face a brown study under her parted straight brown hair done up in back, the irises so contracted in her smiling brown eyes that she seemed both blind and fond. There was a tiny straight scar on her upper lip, diamonded with sweat, which gave the effect of a slight pout. It was more of a quirk I discovered later, the lip forever atremble, trembling on the very point of joke, irony, anger, deprecation.
There was to be a dance that night out of doors under the stars and Japanese lanterns. How to ask her? Just ask her?
What did I want? Just to dance with her, to hold that quick brown body in my arms not even close but lightly and away so I could see into her face and catch those brown eyes with mine.
Then what to do? Go blundering into the four of them between sets and straight out ask her? Skulk behind a tree and waylay her on her way to her cottage? Without being introduced? What arcane Georgia-Carolina rule would that break?
As it turned out, of course, yes I should have asked her, asked her any way at all, and of course there were no rules. And as it turned out, she had noticed me too, as girls do: seeing without looking and wondering who that tall boy was looking at her, hands in pockets under his tree. Why doesn’t he come over and state his business? Why doesn’t he ask me to the dance? She was direct: later when I showed up in her parents’ cottage and stood about smiling and watching her, uncharacteristically shy (what were the cottage rules?), she would even say it: Well? State your business.
We were married, moved into Belle Isle, had two children. Then she died. I suppose her death was tragic. But to me it seemed simply curious. How curious that she should grow pale, thin, weak, and die in a few months! Her blood turned to milk—the white cells replaced the red cells. How curious to wake up one morning alone again in Belle Isle, just as I had been alone in my youth!
Jesus, come in and sit down. You look awful. You look like the patient this morning, not me. Why so pale and sad? After all, you’re supposed to have the good news, not me. Knowing you, I think I know what ails you. You believe all right, but you’re thinking, Christ, what’s the use? Has your God turned his back on you? It was easier in Biafra, wasn’t it, than in plain old Louisiana, U.S.A.?
Well, at least I have good news. The girl in the next room answered my knock! I knocked and she knocked back! She has not caught on that we might invent a new language. She just repeats the one knock, two knocks. That is a beginning, a communication of sorts, isn’t it? When I tried a sentence, not who are you but how are you (because h has only eight knocks against w’s twenty-three), she fell silent.
How to simplify the code? Or what do you think of a note passed out my window and into hers? See how I’ve straightened out this coat hanger, but it’s not enough. Two coat hangers, perhaps.
What? Why not just go around and see her?
But she will not speak to anyone. Hm. You see that is the point. To make conversation in the old tongue, the old worn-out language. It can’t be done.
On the other hand, I could go to her door and knock twice. She would know who it was and could knock or not knock.
Then do what? Talk? Talk about what? Some years ago I discovered that I had nothing to say to anybody nor anybody to me, that is, anything worth listening to. There is nothing left to say. So I stopped talking. Until you showed up. I don’t know why I want to talk to you or what I need to tell you or need to hear from you. There is something … about that night … I discovered something. It’s strange: I have to tell you in order to know what I already know. I talk, you don’t. Perhaps you know even better than I that too much has been said already. Perhaps I talk to you because of your silence. Your silence is the only conversation I can listen to.
Then what do I want of her, the woman next door?
In some strange way she is like Lucy. Lucy was a virgin! and I did not want her otherwise. What I wanted was to dance with her on a summer night, hold her lightly and look into her eyes. I wanted Margot’s sweet Texas ass and I wanted Lucy’s opaque Georgia eyes.
This girl in the next cell is not a virgin. She was raped by three men in one night and then forced to perform fellatio on them.
I’ve learned more about her. In fact, I managed to catch a glimpse of her chart while the nurses were off in the lounge drinking coffee. She is twenty-nine and comes, like Lucy, from Georgia. She dropped out of Agnes Scott, a fine young-ladies’ school, and went to live in an artists’ community in La Jolla. The standard boring story of our times. Then, thinking better of it, of California and the New Life (which of course is not a new life at all but the last spasm of the old, the logical and inevitable culmination, the very caricature of the old, the new life being nothing more or less than what their parents would do if they dared), she removed to the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, lived in Desire project, offered herself up in service to mankind. Whereupon mankind took her up on her offer, raped her for her pains, and left her for dead in the Quarter.
Then how is she like Lucy? How is she the Lucy of the new world? Is it because the violation she suffered has in some sense restored her virginity, much as a person recovering from the plague is immune to the plague? I don’t quite know why she is so much like Lucy except that I want the same thing of her I wanted from Lucy: to come close but keep a little distance between us, to ask the simplest questions in a new language—How are you—just to hear the sound of her voice, to touch the tips of her fingers, to hand her through an open door ahead of me, my hand pressed lightly against the small of her back. The night of the day I discovered Margot’s infidelity, I left my old life path, became sober for the first time in years, bathed, shaved, dressed in clean clothes, and spent the nig
ht wide awake and watchful in my plantation rocker placed at such an angle that, looking through a window and the one clear pane of glass in the stained-glass door Margot had sure enough found for me (the final camp touch which Margot said would make the pigeonnier a charming little place and it did), I could see Belle Isle and most of the private drive.
My supper companions had left for the Holiday Inn about eleven o’clock to view the week’s rushes. That took no more than an hour, but afterwards they often got carried away by discussion, “more like knock-down-drag-out-argument,” said Margot, which went on till one or two in the morning.
How long would the knock-down-drag-out argument last that night, I wondered and, instead of drinking myself to sleep, stayed up to see.
She did not come home at all.
Or rather her Country Squire wagon, she alone in it, turned into the driveway at 8:30 the next morning, rolling so slowly that it hardly made a crunch in the pea gravel. As punctually as Kant setting out for the university at exactly six o’clock so that shopkeepers along the way could set their watches by him, it had been my custom to arise at exactly nine o’clock, stagger to a cold shower, and, of late, take a drink. At exactly 9:37 (two minutes after the news) I would take my seat at the breakfast table at Belle Isle. At 10:15 I was at my office, helping Negroes in the sixties, handling old ladies’ estates in the seventies.
That morning I sat in my plantation rocker, sober and clear-headed, and rocked for a while.
I sat down to breakfast at the usual time, Margot ate heartily, elbows on table, wiry head bent over steaming scrambled eggs. My hand shook slightly as I drank coffee; my stomach shrank as if braced against the first hot bourbon of the day.
“How were the rushes?”
“Oh. Christ. One abortion after another. The bloody color was off again. Bob was beside himself.”
Now bloody was the word. Merlin was not really English but lived there long enough so that everything was bloody this and bloody that.
