by Walker Percy
Now I’ve got my revolver, by crawling to the closet and back. The carbine is downstairs.
No sign of the sniper. Has he gone?
Directly above my head on the glass-topped coffee table are Doris’s favorite books just as she left them in the “enclosed patio.” That was before I roofed it, and the books are swollen by old rains to fat wads of pulp, but still stacked so:
Siddhartha
Atlas Shrugged
ESP and the New Spirituality
Books matter. My poor wife, Doris, was ruined by books, by books and a heathen Englishman, not by dirty books but by clean books, not by depraved books but by spiritual books. God, if you recall, did not warn his people against dirty books. He warned them against high places. My wife, who began life as a cheerful Episcopalian from Virginia, became a priestess of the high places. I loved her dearly and loved to lie with her and would and did whene’er she would allow it, but most especially in the morning, at breakfast, in the nine o’clock sunlight out here on the “enclosed patio.” But books ruined her. Beware of Episcopal women who take up with Ayn Rand and the Buddha and Dr. Rhine formerly of Duke University. A certain type of Episcopal girl has a weakness that comes on them just past youth, just as sure as Italian girls get fat. They fall prey to Gnostic pride, commence buying antiques, and develop a yearning for esoteric doctrine.
Doris stood on these black pebbles, which we brought from Mexico, and told me she was leaving me.
Samantha had been dead some months. Doris began talking of going to the Isle of Jersey or New Zealand where she hoped to recover herself, learn quiet breathing in a simple place, etcetera etcetera, perhaps in the bright shadow of a ’dobe wall or perhaps in a stone cottage under a great green fell. She wanted to leave the bad thing here and go away and make a fresh start. That was all right with me. I was ready to go. I wanted out from the bad thing too. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was for her part of the bad thing.
“I’m leaving, Tom.”
“Where are you going?”
She did not reply.
The morning sun, just beginning to slant down into the “enclosed patio,” struck the top of her yellow hair, sending off fiery aureoles like sunflares. I never got over the splendor of her person in the morning, her royal green-linen-clad self, fragrant and golden-fleshed. Her flesh was gold amorphous stuff. Though it was possible to believe that her arm had the usual layers of fat, muscle, artery, bone, these gross tissues were in her somehow transformed by her girl-chemistry, bejeweled by her double-X chromosome. Those were the days of short skirts, and she looked like long-thighed Mercury, god of morning. Her heels had wings. Her legs were long and deep-fleshed, bound laterally in the thigh by a strap of fascia that flattened the triceps. Was it her slight maleness, long-leggedness—perhaps 10 percent tunic-clad Mercury was she—that set my heart pounding over breakfast?
No, that’s foolishness. I loved her, that’s all.
“Where are you going?” I asked again, buttering the grits and watching her hair flame like the sun’s corolla.
“I’m going in search of myself.”
My heart sank. This was not really her way of talking. It was the one tactic against which I was defenseless, the portentous gravity of her new beliefs. When she was an ordinary ex-Episcopalian, a good-humored Virginia girl with nothing left of her religion but a fondness for old brick chapels, St John o’ the Woods, and the superb English of the King James Version, we had common ground.
“Don’t leave, Doris,” I said, feeling my head grow heavy and sink toward the grits.
“I have to leave. It is the one thing I must do.”
“Why do you have to leave?”
“We’re so dead, Tom. Dead inside. I must go somewhere and recover myself. To the lake isle of Innisfree.”
“Jesus, let’s go to the lake isle together.”
“We don’t relate any more, Tom.”
“I’d like to relate now.”
“I know, I know. That’s how you see it.”
“How?”
“As physical.”
“What’s wrong with physical?”
Doris sighed, her eyes full of sunlight “Who was it who said the physical is the lowest common denominator of love?”
“I don’t know. Probably a Hindoo. Would you sit here?”
“What a travesty of love, the assertion of one’s conjugal rights.”
“I wasn’t thinking of my conjugal rights. I was thinking of you.”
“Love should be a joyous encounter.”
“I’m joyous.”
She was right. Lately her mournful spirituality had provoked in me the most primitive impulses. In ten seconds’ time my spirits had revived. My heart’s desire was that she sit on my lap in the yellow muscadine sunlight.
I took her about the hips. No Mercury she, here.
She neither came nor left.
“But we don’t relate,” said Doris absently, still not leaving though, eyes fixed on Saint Francis who was swarming with titmice. “There are no overtones in our relationship, no nuances, no upper mansions. Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul.”
“All right.”
“It’s not your fault or my fault. People grow away from each other. Spiritual growth is the law of life. Our obligation is to be true to ourselves and to relate to this law of life.”
“Isn’t marriage a relation?”
“Our marriage is a collapsed morality, like a burnt-out star which collapses into itself, gives no light and is heavy heavy heavy.”
Collapsed morality. Law of life. More stately mansions. Here are unmistakable echoes of her friend Alistair Fuchs-Forbes. A few years ago Doris, who joined the Unity church, got in the habit of putting up English lecturers of various Oriental persuasions, Brahmin, Buddhist, Sikh, Zoroastrian. Two things Doris loved, the English people and Eastern religion. Put the two together, Alistair Fuchs-Forbes reciting I Ching in a B.B.C. accent, and poor Episcopal Doris, Apple Queen, from Winchester, Virginia, was a goner.
Alistair Fuchs-Forbes, who came once to lecture at Doris’s Unity church, took to coming back and staying longer. He and his boy friend Raymond. Here they would sit, in my “enclosed patio,” on their broad potato-fed English asses, and speak of the higher things, of the law of life —and of the financial needs of their handicraft retreat in Mexico. There in Cozumel, it seemed, was the last hope of the Western world. Transcendental religion could rescue Western materialism. How? by making-and-meditation, meditating and making things with one’s hands, simple good earthbound things like clay pots. Not a bad idea really—I’d have gone with her to Cozumel and made pots—but here they sat on my patio, these two fake English gurus, speaking of the law of spiritual growth, all the while swilling my scotch and eating three-dollar rib-eye steaks that I barbecued on my patio grill. They spoke of Hindoo reverence for life, including cattle, and fell upon my steaks like jackals.
It didn’t take Alistair long to discover that it was Doris, not I, who was rich.
“A collapsed morality?”
“I am truly sorry, Tom.”
“I’m not sure I know what a collapsed morality means.”
“That’s it. It’s meaning we’ve lost. What is meaningful between us? We simply follow rules and habit like poor beasts on a treadmill.”
“There is something in that. Especially since Samantha died. But why don’t we work at it together. I love you.”
“I love you too, Tom. I’m extremely devoted to you and I always will be. But don’t you see that people grow away from each other. A part of one dies, but the rest grows and encysts the old part. Like the chambered nautilus. We’re dead.”
“I love you dead. At this moment.”
My arms are calipers measuring the noble breadth of her hips. She doesn’t yield, but she doesn’t leave.
“Dead, dead,” she whispered above me in the sunlight
“Love,” I whispered.
We were speaking in calm matutinal voices like a p
air of wood thrushes fluting in the swamp.
“My God, how can you speak of love?”
“Come here, I’ll show you.”
“Here?” she said crossly. “I’m here.”
“Here.”
We had not made love since Samantha’s death. I had wanted to, but Doris had a way of ducking her head and sighing and looking elegiac that put me off and made me feel guilty besides. There is this damnable female talent for making a man ashamed, not merely turning him down but putting the guilt of it on him. She made me feel like a high school boy with impure thoughts. Worse than that: a husband with “conjugal rights,” and that’s enough to chill the warmest heart.
But not mine this morning. I pick up the napkin from my lap.
“Come here.”
“What for?” A tiny spark of old Virginny, the Shenandoah Valley, rekindling in her: her saying “what for” and not “why.”
“Come and see.”
What she did was the nicest compromise between her faraway stare, her sun worship, and lovemaking. She came closer, yet kept her eye on the titmice.
“But you don’t love me,” she said to Saint Francis.
“Yes I do.”
She gave me a friendly jostle, the first, and looked down.
“Tch. For pity’s sake!” Again, a revival of her old Shenandoah good humor. “Annie Mae is coming, you idiot.”
“Close the curtains then.”
“I’m leaving,” she said but stood closer, again a nicely calculated ambiguity: is she standing close to be close or to get between me and the window so Annie Mae can’t see?
“Don’t leave,” I say with soaring hopes.
“I have to leave.”
Then I made a mistake and asked her where she was going.
Again her eyes went away.
“East of the sun and west of the moon.”
“What crap.”
She shrugged. “I’m packed.”
Knowing I was wrong, I argued.
“Are you going to meet Alistair and that gang of fags?”
Doris was rich and there was much talk of her financing the Cozumel retreat and even of her coming down and making herself whole.
“Don’t call him that. He’s searching like me. And he’s almost found peace. Underneath all that charm he’s—”
“What charm?”
“A very tragic person. But he’s a searcher like me, a pilgrim.”
“Pilgrim my ass.”
“Did you know that for two years he took up a begging bowl and wandered the byways with a disciple of Ramakrishna, the greatest fakir of our time?”
“He’s a fakir all right. What he is is a fake Hindoo English fag son of a bitch.” Why did I say the very thing that would send her away?
Here was where I had set a record: that of all cuckolds in history, I am the first American to be cuckolded by two English fruits.
“Is that what he is?” said Doris gravely.
“Yes.”
“What are you, Tom?”
“I couldn’t say.”
She nodded absently, but now (!) her hand is on my head, ruffling my hair and strumming just as she used to strum her fingers on the Formica in the kitchen.
“Who was it who said: if I were offered the choice between having the truth and searching for it, I’d take the search?”
“I don’t know. Probably Hermann Hesse.”
“Hadn’t we better close the curtains?”
“Yes. You do it. I can’t get up.”
She laughed for the first time in six months. “Boy, you are a mess.”
We’re back in Virginia, at school, under the apple blossoms.
She looked down at me. “Annie Mae’s going to see you.”
“She’d be proud of me.”
“Don’t be vulgar.”
Annie Mae is a big hefty black girl whom Doris dressed up like a French maid with a tiny white cap and a big butterfly bow on her tail.
“Sit in my lap.”
“How?”
“This way.”
“O.K.”
“Easy!”
“Oh boy,” she said, nodding and tucking her lip in her old style. Her hand rested as lightly on my shoulder as it did at the Washington and Lee Black-and-White formal. What a lovely funny Valley girl she was before the goddamn heathen Oriental English got her.
“You know the trouble with you, Tom?” She was always telling me the trouble with me.
“What?”
“You’re not a seeker after the truth. You think you have the truth, and what good does it do you?”
“Here’s the truth.” Nobody can blaspheme like a bad Catholic.
“Say what you like about Alistair,” she said—and settled herself! “He’s a seeker and so am I.”
“I know what he seeks.”
“What?”
“Your money.”
“That’s how you would see it.”
“That’s how I see it.”
“Even if it were true, would it be worse than wanting just my body?”
“Yes. But I don’t want just your body.”
“What do you want?”
“You.”
“But not the real me.”
“Jesus.”
But she was jostling me, bumping me carelessly like a fraternity brother in a stagline.
“You know the trouble with you, Tom?”
“What?”
“You don’t understand a purely spiritual relationship.”
“That’s true.”
Somewhere Doris had got the idea that love is spiritual. So lately she’d had no use for my carrying on, as she called it, or messing about, putting her down in the zoysia grass, etcetera, with friendly whacks on the thick parts and shouts of joy for the beauty of the morning, hola! I do truly believe that she came to look upon her solemn spiritual adultery with that fag Alistair as somehow more elevating than ordinary morning love with her husband.
“You never grasped that,” said Doris, but leaning closer and giving me a hug.
“Then grasp this.”
We sat in the chair, the chair not being an ordinary chair, which would have been fine, but a Danish sling, since in those days ordinary chairs had canceled out and could not be sat on. Married as we were and what with marriage tending to cancel itself and beds having come not to be places for making love in or chairs for sitting on, we had no place to lie or sit. We were like forlorn lovers in the street with no place to go.
But love conquers all, even a Danish sling.
“Darling,” said Doris, forgetting for once all the foolishness.
“Let’s lie down,” I said.
“Fine, but how?”
“Just hold still. I’ll pick you up.”
Have you ever tried to get up out of a Danish sling with a hundred-and-forty-pound Apple Queen in your lap?
But I got up.
We lay on the bricks, here in this spot Perhaps this is why I feel better lying here now. Here, at any rate, we lay and made love for the last time. We thought no more of Hermann Hesse that day.
In two weeks she was gone. Why? I think it was because she never forgave me or God for Samantha’s death.
“That’s a loving God you have there,” she told me toward the end, when the neuroblastoma had pushed one eye out and around the nosebridge so that Samantha looked like a two-eyed Picasso profile. After that, Doris went spiritual and I became coarse and disorderly. She took the high road and I took the low. She said I was like a Polack miner coming up out of the earth every night with no thought but to fill his belly and hump his wife. The expression “hump” shocked me and was unlike her. She may have lost her faith but she’d always kept her Virginia-Episcopal decorum. But she’d been reading current novels, which at the time spoke of “humping” a great deal, though to tell the truth I had not heard the expression. Was this a word invented by New York novelists?
2
At last, getting up and keeping clear of the windows, I fetch my me
dical bag, which is packed this morning not merely with medicines but with other articles that I shall presently describe, and stick the revolver in my belt and slip out the lower “woods” door at the back of the house where it is impossible to be seen by an assailant lurking in the swamp.
The door, unused since Doris left, is jammed by vines. I squeeze through into the hot muscadine sunlight. Here the undergrowth has almost reached the house. Wistaria has taken the stereo-V antenna.
Two strides and I’m swallowed up in a plantation of sumac. It is easy to keep cover and circle around to the swamp edge and have a long look. Nothing stirring. Egrets sail peacefully over the prairie. A wisp of smoke rises from a hummock. There some drughead from Michigan State lies around smoking Choctaw cannab while his girl fries catfish.
I rub my eyes. Did I imagine the sniper’s shots? Was it part and parcel of the long night’s dream of Verdun, of the terrible assault of the French infantry on Fort Douaumont? No. There is the shattered window of the “enclosed patio.”
What to do? The best course: walk to town by a route known only to me in order to avoid ambush. Call the police at the first telephone.
But in the thick chablis sunlight humming with bees, it is hard to credit assassination. A stray guerrilla perhaps, using my plate glass for target practice.
Anyhow, I have other fish to fry. First to the Center, where I hope to have a word with Max Gottlieb, ask a favor of him; then perhaps catch a glimpse of Moira in Love Clinic; thence to Howard Johnson’s to arrange a trysting place, a lover’s rendezvous with Moira, my love from Love.
Afterwards there should be time for a long Saturday afternoon in my office—no patients, no nurse today—where I shall sip Early Times and listen to my father’s old tape of Don Giovanni with commentary by Milton Cross.
Using my bag to fend off blackberries, I angle off to a curve of Paradise Drive where the woods notch in close.
Standing in the schoolbus shelter, now a cave of creeper and muscadine, I get my bearings. Across the road and fifty feet of open space, a forest of longleaf begins. A hundred yards into it and I should pick up the old caddy path that leads from town to country club.
Wait five minutes to be sure. No sound but the droning of bees in honeysuckle.