The Moviegoer

by Walker Percy

  “What?”

  “I heard it all, you poor stupid bastard.” Then, appearing to forget herself, she drums her nails rapidly upon the windshield. “Are you going home now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait for me there.”

  2

  IT IS A GLOOMY day. Gentilly is swept fitfully by desire and by an east wind from the burning swamps at Chef Menteur.

  Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde When I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

  Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral. My search has been abandoned; it is no match for my aunt, her rightness and her despair, her despairing of me and her despairing of herself. Whenever I take leave of my aunt after one of her serious talks, I have to find a girl.

  Fifty minutes of waiting for Kate on the ocean wave and I am beside myself. What has happened to her? She has spoken to my aunt and kicked me out. There is nothing to do but call Sharon at the office. The little pagoda of aluminum and glass, standing in the neutral ground of Elysian Fields at the very heart of the uproar of a public zone, is trim and pretty on the outside but evil-smelling within. Turning slowly around, I take note of the rhymes in pencil and the sad cartoons of solitary lovers; the wire thrills and stops and thrills and in the interval there comes into my ear my own breath as if my very self stood beside me and would not speak. The phone does not answer. Has she quit?

  Some children have come into the playground across the street; two big boys give them a ride on the ocean wave. Ordinarily the little children ride only the merry-go-round which is set close to the ground and revolves in a fixed orbit.

  I’ve got to find her, Rory. It is certain now that my aunt is right and that Kate knows it and that nothing is left but Sharon. The east wind whistles through the eaves of my pagoda and presses the glass against its fittings. I try the apartment. She is out. But Joyce is there, Joyce-in-the-window, Joyce of the naughty-you mouth and the buckskin jacket.

  “This is Jack Bolling, Joyce,” says a voice from old Virginia.

  “Well well.”

  “Is Sharon there?”

  “She is out with her mother and Stan.” Joyce’s voice has a Middle West snap. Moth-errr, she says and: we-ull we-ull. “I don’t know when shill be back.” She sounds like Pepper Young’s sister.

  “Who is Stan?”

  “Stan Shamoun, her fiancé.”

  “Oh yes, that’s right.” What’s right? She’s not only quit. She’s marrying the macaroni. “What about you? Are you getting married?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve been wanting to meet you for some time.”

  “I just thot of something.”

  “What?”

  “The Lord of Misrule reigned yesterday—”

  “Who?” Is she starting out on some sort of complicated Midwestern joke? Grinning like a lunatic, I hold on for dear life.

  Joyce goes on talking in a roguish voice about the Lord of Misrule and a fellow down from Purdue, a dickens if she ever saw one.

  The two big boys on the playground have got the ocean wave going fast enough so they can jump on and keep up speed by kicking the ground away on the low passes. Iii-oorrr iii-oorrr goes the dry socket on its pole in a faraway childish music and the children embrace the iron struts and lay back their heads to watch the whirling world.

  “Joyce, I wonder if I may be frank with you”—the voice comes into my ear and I myself am silent.

  “Please do. I like frank people.”

  “I thought you were that kind of person—” Old confederate Marlon Brando—a reedy insinuating voice, full of winks and leers and above all pleased with itself. What a shock. On and on it goes. “—I know some folks might think it was a little unconventional but I’m gon tell you anyway. I know you don’t remember it but I saw you last Saturday—” It is too much trouble to listen.

  “I remember!”

  Round and round goes the ocean wave screeching out its Petrouchka music iii-oorrr iii-oorrr and now belling out so far that the inner bumper catches the pole and slings around in a spurt so outrageously past all outrage that the children embrace the iron struts for dear life.

  “I’m only home for lunch,” says Joyce. “But why don’t you come over Saturday night. Some of the kids will be there. Praps we could all go to Pat O’Brien’s.” Joyce makes herself out to be a big girl child, one of the kids, and all set for high jinks.

  “No praps about it.”

  A watery sunlight breaks through the smoke of the Chef and turns the sky yellow. Elysian Fields glistens like a vat of sulfur; the playground looks as if it alone had survived the end of the world. At last I spy Kate; her stiff little Plymouth comes nosing into my bus stop. There she sits like a bomber pilot, resting on her wheel and looking sideways at the children and not seeing, and she could be I myself, sooty eyed and nowhere.

  Is it possible that—For a long time I have secretly hoped for the end of the world and believed with Kate and my aunt and Sam Yerger and many other people that only after the end could the few who survive creep out of their holes and discover themselves to be themselves and live as merrily as children among the viny ruins. Is it possible that—it is not too late?

  Iii-oorrr goes the ocean wave, its struts twinkling in the golden light, its skirt swaying to and fro like a young dancing girl.

  “I’d like to very much, Joyce. May I bring along my own fiancée, Kate Cutrer? I want you and Sharon to meet her.”

  “Why shore, why shore,” says Joyce in a peculiar Midwest take-off of her roommate Sharon and sounding somewhat relieved, to tell the truth.

  The playground is deserted. I notice that the school itself is locked and empty. Traffic goes hissing along Elysian Fields and the jaybirds jeer in the camphor trees. People turn in now and then at the school gate but they make for the church next door. At first I suppose it is a wedding or a funeral, but they leave by twos and threes and more arrive. Then, as a pair of youths come ambling along the sidewalk, I catch sight of the smudge at the hair roots. Of course. It is Ash Wednesday. Sharon has not quit me. All Cutrer branch offices close on Ash Wednesday.

  We sit in Kate’s car, a 1951 Plymouth which, with all her ups and downs, Kate has ever cared for faithfully. It is a tall gray coupe and it runs with a light gaseous sound. When she drives, head ducked down, hands placed symmetrically on the wheel, the pale underflesh of her arms trembling slightly, her paraphernalia—straw seat, Kleenex dispenser, magnetic tray for cigarettes—all set in order about her, it is easy to believe that the light stiff little car has become gradually transformed by its owner until it is hers herself in its every nut and bolt. When it comes fresh from the service station, its narrow tires still black and wet, the very grease itself seems not the usual muck but the thrifty amber sap of the slender axle tree.

  “Why didn’t you tell her about our plans?” Kate still holds the steering wheel and surveys the street. “I was in the library and heard every word. You idiot.”

  Kate is pleased. She is certain that I have carried off a grand stoic gesture, like a magazine hero.

  “Did you tell her?” I ask.

  “I told her we are to be
married.”

  “Are we?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “She didn’t. She only hoped that you might come to see her this afternoon.”

  “I have to anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “I promised her one week ago I would tell her what I planned to do.”

  “What do you plan to do?”

  I shrug. There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, and for good and selfish reasons. It only remains to decide whether this vocation is best pursued in a service station or—

  “Are you going to medical school?”

  “If she wants me to.”

  “Does that mean you can’t marry me now?”

  “No. You have plenty of money.”

  “Then let us understand each other.”

  “All right.”

  “I don’t know whether I can succeed.”

  “I know you don’t.”

  “It seems the wildest sort of thing to do.”

  “Yes.”

  “We had better make it fast.”

  “All right.”

  “I am so afraid.”

  Kate’s forefinger begins to explore the adjacent thumb, testing the individual spikes of the feathered flesh. A florid new Mercury pulls up behind us and a Negro gets out and goes up into the church. He is more respectable than respectable; he is more middle-class than one could believe: his Archie Moore mustache, the way he turns and, seeing us see him, casts a weather eye at the sky; the way he plucks a handkerchief out of his rear pocket with a flurry of his coat tail and blows his nose in a magic placative gesture (you see, I have been here before: it is a routine matter).

  “If I could be sure you knew how frightened I am, it would help a great deal.”

  “You can be sure.”

  “Not merely of marriage. This afternoon I wanted some cigarettes, but the thought of going to the drugstore turned me to jelly.”

  I am silent.

  “I am frightened when I am alone and I am frightened when I am with people. The only time I’m not frightened is when I’m with you. You’ll have to be with me a great deal.”

  “I will.”

  “Do you want to?” “Yes.”

  “I will be under treatment a long time.”

  “I know that.”

  “And I’m not sure I’ll ever change. Really change.”

  “You might.”

  “But I think I see a way. It seems to me that if we are together a great deal and you tell me the simplest things and not laugh at me—I beg you for pity’s own sake never to laugh at me—tell me things like: Kate, it is all right for you to go down to the drugstore, and give me a kiss, then I will believe you. Will you do that?” she says with her not-quite-pure solemnity, her slightly reflected Sarah Lawrence solemnity.

  “Yes, I’ll do that.”

  She has started plucking at her thumb in earnest, tearing away little shreds of flesh. I take her hand and kiss the blood.

  “But you must try not to hurt yourself so much.”

  “I will try! I will!”

  The Negro has already come outside. His forehead is an ambiguous sienna color and pied: it is impossible to be sure that he received ashes. When he gets in his Mercury, he does not leave immediately but sits looking down at something on the seat beside him. A sample case? An insurance manual? I watch him closely in the rear-view mirror. It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus?

  It is impossible to say.

  Epilogue

  SO ENDED MY THIRTIETH year to heaven, as the poet called it.

  In June Kate and I were married. It was practicable to wind up my business affairs in Gentilly and to accompany my aunt to North Carolina sooner than I expected, since Sharon, now Mrs Stanley Shamoun, had become so competent that she was able to transact the light summer business without assistance, at least until my replacement could be found. In August Mr Sartalamaccia purchased my duck club for twenty five thousand dollars. When medical school began in September, Kate found a house near her stepmother, one of the very shotgun cottages done over by my cousin Nell Lovell and very much to Kate’s taste with its saloon doors swinging into the kitchen, its charcoal-gray shutters and its lead St Francis in the patio.

  My aunt has become fond of me. As soon as she accepted what she herself had been saying all those years, that the Bolling family had gone to seed and that I was not one of her heroes but a very ordinary fellow, we got along very well. Both women find me comical and laugh a good deal at my expense.

  On Mardi Gras morning of the next year, my Uncle Jules suffered a second heart attack at the Boston Club, from which he later died.

  The following May, a few days after his fifteenth birthday, my half-brother Lonnie Smith died of a massive virus infection which was never positively identified.

  As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject. For one thing, I have not the authority, as the great Danish philosopher declared, to speak of such matters in any way other than the edifying. For another thing, it is not open to me even to be edifying, since the time is later than his, much too late to edify or do much of anything except plant a foot in the right place as the opportunity presents itself—if indeed asskicking is properly distinguished from edification.

  Further: I am a member of my mother’s family after all and so naturally shy away from the subject of religion (a peculiar word this in the first place, religion; it is something to be suspicious of).

  Reticence, therefore, hardly having a place in a document of this kind, it seems as good a time as any to make an end.

  The day before Lonnie died, Kate took a notion to pay him a visit. Ordinarily I pick her up at Merle’s office, drop her off at her stepmother’s and drive downtown where I transact a few odds and ends of business for her, my aunt, at Uncle Jules’ office. But today we have only to walk across the street from Merle’s office to Touro Infirmary.

  I had my doubts about Kate’s idea. It was an extravagant womanish sort of whim, what I call privately a doubling, or duplication: like the time she took a notion to fly to Dallas in a state of rapture and hear Marian Anderson; it sounded to her like the sort of thing one might well do. I don’t mean she worries about what is the fashionable thing to do; no, it just sounded like a good thing to do—what one does under the circumstances if one is the sort of person who etc etc—so she did it. Also: she had not seen Lonnie since the onset of his illness and although I tried to prepare her for the change, she was not prepared.

  Afterwards in the street, she went stumbling ahead of me, knuckles in her mouth and blind with tears.

  “Oh my God, how dreadful.”

  “I shouldn’t have let you go.”

  “It was like a blow in the face.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That poor little boy—he’s so hideously thin and yellow, like one of those wrecks lying on a flatcar at Dachau. Why is he so yellow?”

  “He’s got a hepatitis.”

  “How can you be so cold-blooded? Are you going to be thick-skinned and bumptious like a medical student? How I hate that! He’s dying, Binx!”

  “I know.”

  “What was that he whispered to you?”

  “He told me he had conquered an habitual disposition.”

  “What is that?”

  “He also said you were a very good-looking girl.”

  “He breaks my heart!” We walk in silence. “And his poor parents. Did you see the way Mr Smith stepped out into the hall and dashed the tears from his eyes like a countryman?”

  “Yes.”<
br />
  “It is so pitiful.”

  She stops to blow her nose. Her heavy gunmetal hair is separated by a wide ragged part. I kiss the thick white skin of her scalp. “You are very good-looking today.” In the past year, she has fattened up; her shoulders are sleek as a leopard.

  Kate is horrified. “Please don’t.” She plucks at her thumb. “There is something grisly about you.”

  “I have to find the children.” When Lonnie took a turn for the worse early this morning, my mother had to bring all the children with her, all but Jean-Paul. They’ve been sitting in the car since eight o’clock.

  Thérèse catches sight of me and sticks her sharp little face out the window. “How is Lonnie?” she asks, trying a weaving motion.

  “He is very sick.”

  “Is he going to die?” Thérèse asks in her canny smart-girl way.

  “Yes.” I sit around backwards to see them. Kate smiles in at them and stands a ways off. “But he wouldn’t want you to be sad. He told me to give you a kiss and tell you that he loved you.”

  They are not sad. This is a very serious and out-of-the-way business. Their eyes search out mine and they cast about for ways of prolonging the conversation, this game of serious talk and serious listening.

  “We love him too,” says Mathilde with a sob.

  “Kiss us first!” cry Donice and Clare from the back seat.

  Mathilde sobs in my neck and Thérèse eyes me shrewdly. “Was he anointed?” she asks in her mama-bee drone.

  “Yes.”

  “Very good.”

  Only the two girls are sad, but they are also secretly proud of having caught onto the tragedy.

  Donice casts about. “Binx,” he says and then appears to forget. “When Our Lord raises us up on the last day, will Lonnie still be in a wheelchair or will he be like us?”

  “He’ll be like you.”

  “You mean he’ll be able to ski?” The children cock their heads and listen like old men.

  “Yes.”

  “Hurray!” cry the twins, but somewhat abstractly and more or less attentive to the sound of their own voices.

  “Listen,” I say, laughing at them. “How would you like to go up to Audubon Park and ride the train?”