The Moviegoer

by Walker Percy

  “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.

  Kate shakes her head slowly in the rapt way she got from her stepmother. I try to steer her away from beauty. Beauty is a whore.

  “You see that building yonder? That’s Southern Life & Accident. If you had invested a hundred dollars in 1942, you’d now be worth twenty five thousand. Your father bought a good deal of the original stock.” Money is a better god than beauty.

  “You don’t know what I mean,” she cries in the same soft rapture.

  I know what she means all right. But I know something she doesn’t know. Money is a good counterpoise to beauty. Beauty, the quest of beauty alone, is a whoredom. Ten years ago I pursued beauty and gave no thought to money. I listened to the lovely tunes of Mahler and felt a sickness in my very soul. Now I pursue money and on the whole feel better.

  “I see how I could live in a city!” Kate cries. She turns to face me and clasps her hands behind my waist.

  “How?”

  “Only one way. By your telling me what to do. It is as simple as that. Why didn’t I see it before?”

  “That I should tell you what to do?”

  “Yes. It may not be the noblest way of living, but it is one way. It is my way! Oh dear sweet old Binx, what a joy it is to discover at last what one is. It doesn’t matter what you are as long as you know!”

  “What are you?”

  “I’ll gladly tell you because I just found out and I never want to forget. Please don’t let me forget. I am a religious person.”

  “How is that?
”

  “Don’t you see? What I want is to believe in someone completely and then do what he wants me to do. If God were to tell me: Kate, here is what I want you to do; you get off this train right now and go over there to that corner by the Southern Life and Accident Insurance Company and stand there for the rest of your life and speak kindly to people—you think I would not do it? You think I would not be the happiest girl in Jackson, Mississippi? I would.”

  I have a drink and look at her corner. The moonlight seems palpable, a dense pure matrix in which is embedded curbstone and building alike.

  She takes the bottle. “Will you tell me what to do?”

  “Sure.”

  “You can do it because you are not religious. God is not religious. You are the unmoved mover. You don’t need God or anyone else—no credit to you, unless it is a credit to be the most self-centered person alive. I don’t know whether I love you, but I believe in you and I will do what you tell me. Now if I marry you, will you tell me: Kate, this morning do such and such, and if we have to go to a party, will you tell me: Kate, stand right there and have three drinks and talk to so and so? Will you?”

  “Sure.”

  Kate locks her arms around my chest, wrist in hand, and gives me a passionate kiss.

  Later, just as I knew it would, her precious beauty leaves her flat and she is frightened. Another trip to the washroom and now she stands swaying against me as Sieur Iberville rocks along through north Mississippi. We leave spring behind. The moon hangs westering and yellow over winter fields as blackened and ancient and haunted as battlegrounds.

  “Oh oh oh,” Kate moans and clings to me. “I feel awful. Let’s go to your roomette.”

  “It’s been made up.”

  “Then we’ll lie down.”

  We have to lie down: the door opens onto the bed. Feeling tender toward her, I embrace her and tell her that I love her.

  “Oh no,” says Kate and takes hold of me coarsely. “None of that, bucko.”

  “None of what?”

  “No love, please.”

  I misunderstand her and pull away.

  “No no. Don’t leave either,” she says, holding me and watching me still.

  “All right.”

  “Just don’t speak to me of love, bucko.”

  “All right, but don’t call me bucko.”

  Her black spiky eyes fall full upon me, but not quite seeing, I think. Propped on one hand, she bites her lip and lets the other fall on me heavily, as if I were an old buddy. “I’ll tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “The other day I said to Merle.” Again the hand falls heavily and takes hold of me. “What would you say to me having a little fling? He misunderstood me and gave me the business about a mature and tender relation between adults etcetera etcetera—you know. I said, no no, Merle, you got it wrong. I’m talking about some plain old monkey business—” she gives me a shake, “—like a comic book one of your aunt’s maids showed me last week in which Tillie the Toiler and Mac—not the real Tillie, you understand, but a Frenchy version of Tillie—go to an office party and Tillie has a little set-to with Mac in the stockroom and gets caught by Whipple. I told Merle about it and said: that’s what I mean, Merle, how about that?”

  “What did Merle say?”

  Kate doesn’t seem to hear. She drums her fingers on the sill and gazes out at the rushing treetops.

  “So—when all is said and done, that is the real thing, isn’t it? Admit it. You and the little Hondurian on the second floor with her little book, in the morning, in the mid-morning, and there in the linen closet with the mops and pails—”

  “It is your Hondurian and your comic book—”

  “Now I’ll tell you what you can do, Whipple. You get out of here and come back in exactly five minutes. Oh you’re a big nasty Whipple and you’re only fit for one thing.”

  I’ll have to tell you the truth, Rory, painful though it is. Nothing would please me more than to say that I had done one of two things. Either that I did what you do: tuck Debbie in your bed and, with a show of virtue so victorious as to be ferocious, grab pillow and blanket and take to the living-room sofa, there to lie in the dark, hands clasped behind head, gaze at the ceiling and talk through the open door of your hopes and dreams. Or—do what a hero in a novel would do: he too is a seeker and a pilgrim of sorts and he is just in from Guanajuato or Sambuco where he has found the Real Right Thing or from the East where he apprenticed himself to a wise man and became proficient in the seventh path to the seventh happiness. Yet he does not disdain this world either and when it happens that a maid comes to his bed with a heart full of longing for him, he puts down his book in a good and cheerful spirit and gives her as merry a time as she could possibly wish for. Whereupon, with her dispatched into as sweet a sleep as ever Scarlett enjoyed the morning of Rhett’s return, he takes up his book again and is in an instant ten miles high and on the Way.

  No, Rory, I did neither. We did neither. We did very badly and almost did not do at all. Flesh poor flesh failed us. The burden was too great and flesh poor flesh, neither hallowed by sacrament nor despised by spirit (for despising is not the worst fate to overtake the flesh), but until this moment seen through and canceled, rendered null by the cold and fishy eye of the malaise—flesh poor flesh now at this moment summoned all at once to be all and everything, end all and be all, the last and only hope—quails and fails. The truth is I was frightened half to death by her bold (not really bold, not whorish bold but theorish bold) carrying on. I reckon I am used to my blushing little Lindas from Gentilly. Kate too was scared. We shook like leaves. Kate was scared because it seemed now that even Tillie the Toiler must fail her. I never worked so hard in my life, Rory. I had no choice: the alternative was unspeakable. Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian’s life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx—my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me—we’re sinning! We’re succeeding! We’re human after all!).

  “Good night, sweet Whipple. Now you tuck Kate in. Poor Kate.” She turns the pillow over for the cool of the underside. “Good night, sweet Whipple, good night, good night, good night.”

  3

  IT TURNS OUT THAT my misgivings about Chicago were justified. No sooner do we step down from the train than the genie-soul of Chicago flaps down like a buzzard and perches on my shoulder. During the whole of our brief sojourn I am ridden by it—brief sojourn, I say, briefer even than it was planned to be, since it was cut abruptly short by the catastrophe Monday night, the very night of our arrival. All day long before the catastrophe I stand sunk in thought, blinking and bemused, on street corners. Kate looks after me. She is strangely at home in the city, wholly impervious to the five million personal rays of Chicagoans and the peculiar smell of existence here, which must be sniffed and gotten hold of before taking a single step away from the station (if only somebody could tell me who built the damn station, the circumstances of the building, details of the wrangling between city officials and the railroad, so that I would not fall victim to it, the station, the very first crack off the bat. Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff—tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets—in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone). Oh son of a bitch but I am in a sweat. Kate takes charge with many a cluck and much fuss, as if she had caught sight in me of a howling void and meant to conceal it from the world. All of a sudden she is a regular city girl not distinguishable from any other little low-browed olive-skinned big-butted Mediterranean such as populates the streets and subways of the North.

  I am consoled only to see that I w
as not mistaken: Chicago is just as I remembered it. I was here twenty five years ago. My father brought me and Scott up to see the Century of Progress and once later to the World Series. Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place. I could have been wrong: it could have been nothing of the sort, not the memory of a place but the memory of being a child. But one step out into the brilliant March day and there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered. Until now, one genie-soul and only one ever proved too strong for me: San Francisco—up and down the hills I pursued him, missed him and was pursued, by a presence, a powdering of fall gold in the air, a trembling brightness that pierced to the heart, and the sadness of coming at last to the sea, the coming to the end of America. Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North. Knowing all about genie-souls and living in haunted places like Shiloh and the Wilderness and Vicksburg and Atlanta where the ghosts of heroes walk abroad by day and are more real than people, he knows a ghost when he sees one, and no sooner does he step off the train in New York or Chicago or San Francisco than he feels the genie-soul perched on his shoulder.

  Here is Chicago. Now, exactly as twenty five years ago, the buildings are heavy and squarish and set down far apart and at random like monuments on a great windy plain. And the Lake. The Lake in New Orleans is a backwater glimmering away in a pleasant lowland. Not here. Here the Lake is the North itself: a perilous place from which the spirit winds come pouring forth all roused up and crying out alarm.

  The wind and the space—they are the genie-soul. Son of a bitch, how can I think about variable endowments, feeling the genie-soul of Chicago perched on my shoulder?

  But the wind and the space, they are the genie-soul. The wind blows in steady from the Lake and claims the space for its own, scouring every inch of the pavements and the cold stony fronts of the buildings. It presses down between buildings, shouldering them apart in skyey fields of light and air. The air is windpressed into a lens, magnifying and. sharpening and silencing—everything is silenced in the uproar of the wind that comes ransacking down out of the North. This is a city where no one dares dispute the claim of the wind and the skyey space to the out-of-doors. This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground. One other thing I remember: my father took me down into one of these monuments to see the pool where Tarzan-Johnnie-Weissmuller used to swim—an echoing underground place where a cold gray light filtered down from a three-story skylight and muscular men wearing metal discs swam and shouted, their voices ringing against the wet tile walls.