Love in the Ruins

by Walker Percy

  As he talks, Dusty picks up the new lapsometer on the seat between us. He hefts it.

  “Very compact.”

  “Yes.”

  It is a lovely device, all brushed chrome, pointer and dial, and a jade oscilloscope screen the size of a half-dollar, the whole as solid as a good camera. Just the thing, I see now, to take Dusty’s fancy.

  “You take readings?” says Dusty, turning it every which way. He’s all business now, buzzing away while his big fleshy hand hefts, balances, knows.

  “That’s right.”

  “What do you take readings of?”

  I shrug. “You know. Local electrical activity in cortical and subcortical centers. It’s nothing but an EEG without wires, with a stereotactic device for triangulating.”

  “Yeah, I see. Here you measure your micromillivolts.” The lizard scales have fallen from his blue eyes, which bear down like gimlets. His thumb rubs the jade screen as if it were a lucky piece. “And this here—”

  “That’s your oscilloscope to display your wave patterns, with this, see?—a hold-and-stack device. You can stack ten patterns and flip back at will.”

  “You take your readings, then what?”

  “Like the article says, you correlate the readings with various personality traits, attitudes.”

  “You mean, like emotions?” asks Dusty, frowning.

  “Well, yes, among other things.”

  “Isn’t that all rather … subjective?”

  “Is a pointer reading subjective?”

  “But there’s a lot of room for interpretation.”

  “Isn’t there also in an electroencephalogram?” I turn it over. “Here on the back you’ve got your normal readings at key centers.”

  “Yeah. Like a light meter.” He takes it back. The freckled hand can’t leave it alone. Again the thumb tests the grain of the brushed chrome, strokes the jade screen.

  “How long does it take to do a, uh what? An examination?”

  “A reading. I can do a standard profile in less than three minutes.” I look at my watch and open the door. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “Do one on me.”

  “What?”

  “Couldn’t you do a reading right here and now?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “But what?”

  “It’s not a play toy.”

  “Well, damn it, does it work or doesn’t it?”

  “It works.”

  “Show me.”

  “I’ve learned that it’s not to be used lightly.”

  Dusty nods ironically. We’re both thinking of the same thing. It was using my first Brownie model on Lola that got me into trouble. That Christmas Eve six months ago I’d made my breakthrough and had the first inkling what I’d got hold of. I was abstracted, victorious, lonely, drunk, and full of love, and lo, there was Lola, also victorious (she’d had a triumphant concert in Tyler, Texas) and also lonely and full of love. My lapsometer revealed these things. But it was not the cause of our falling in love. Rather the occasion.

  “You need controls for your series, don’t you?” Dusty asks shrewdly.

  “Yes.”

  “Then use me as a control.”

  “You wouldn’t stick a proctoscope up me here in the car, would you?”

  Dusty laughs, but his knuckle turns into my knee. “If you want my endorsement, I’d like to see how it works.”

  “I see.” Why do I feel uneasy? “Oh very well. Take off your coat and lean over the steering wheel, like a sleepy truck driver.”

  “O.K., Doctor.” Dusty says “Doctor” with exactly the same irony priests use in calling each other “Father.”

  It takes two and a half minutes to clock seven readings.

  There is one surprise. He registers good pineal selfhood, which I expected; an all but absent coeliac anxiety—he is, after all, an ex-fullback and hardworking surgeon, a man at home with himself and too busy to worry about it. That is to say: he may fear one thing or another but he’s not afraid of no-thing, which is the worst of fears. His abstractive index is not excessive—he lets his hands do the knowing and working. His red nucleus shows no vagal rage.

  But—

  His love-sex ratio is reversed.

  That is to say: the reading from Brodmann Area 24, the locus of “higher” or interpersonal relations, is a tiny 0.5 mmv while the hypothalamus, seat of organic sexual activity, registers a whacking stud-level 7.9 mmv. The display wave of the latter is well developed. It is the wave of a powerful, frequently satisfied, but indiscriminate sexual appetite. Dusty is divorced.

  “Well?” asks Dusty, buttoning his collar.

  “No real pathology,” I say, pocketing the lapsometer and adjusting my six-gun. I seize the door handle.

  “Hold it, son!” cries Dusty, laughing. “Don’t pull that!”

  “What?”

  “Tell me, you rascal!” Joyfully he socks me with a few eccentric blows.

  “Very well,” I say doubtfully, remembering my vow to tell the truth.

  I show him, clicking back over the wave-displays stacked in the oscilloscope circuit, and tell him, glossing over as best I can the love-sex reversal. But I have not reckoned with Dusty’s acuteness.

  “I see,” he says at last, looking straight ahead, lizard scales lowering over his eyes. “What you’re saying is I’m messing around with my nurses.”

  “I said no such thing. You asked for the readings. I gave them to you. Make your own interpretation.”

  “Is that thing nonpartisan?” he asks in the same voice, yet somehow more ominously.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Does it also measure alcoholism, treachery, laziness, and white-trash morals?”

  “If you like,” I reply in a low voice, but relieved to have him strike at me so hard.

  The freckled hand browses. A switch clicks, locking the doors. It clicks again, unlocking, locking. Is Dusty thinking of beating me up?

  “There’s the door, Doctor.” Click, unlock.

  “Very well. Thanks for the ride.”

  “Don’t mention it. One piece of advice.”

  “Yes?”

  Dusty begins his rhythmic nodding again as the artery pounds away.

  “Lola has a lot more use for you than I do, though I used to. I know you been through a bad time. But let us understand each other.” He still looks straight ahead.

  “All right.”

  “You going to do right by Lola or, Doctor, I’m going to have your ass. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Goodbye, Doctor.”

  “Goodbye.”

  3

  Leaving Dusty’s car, I skirt the festive booths of the Bible Brunch.

  The heat of the concrete pool apron strikes up like the Sahara sands. The sun strikes down into the top of my head. Chunks of Styrofoam water-toys are scattered in the weeds like dirty wedding cake. The pool is empty and drifted with leaves.

  Why has the pool been abandoned?

  A breath of cool air stirs in the doorway of the old pro shop bearing the smell of leather and of splintered pine flooring. The shop too is empty save for a life-size cutout of Gene Sarazen dipping toward the floor. Gene is dressed in knickerbockers and a British cap. A trumpet vine sprouts through the floor and twines around a rusty mashie.

  Why is the pro shop empty? Is there a new pro shop in another part of the building?

  It was not empty when I stood here and kissed Lola.

  I went to the catfish fry and fell in love with Lola and performed with her the act of love in the grassy kidney-shaped bunker of number 18 green (par 4, 275 yards).

  I was standing in the Paradise Country Club bar shaking the worn leather cup of poker dice and gazing at the rows of bottles lined up against the brand-new antiqued wormholed cypress, when I noticed something. The vines had begun to sprout It was the first time I had noticed it. A whitish tendril of vine, perhaps ivy, had sprouted through a wormhole and twined about a bottle of Southern Comfort.

>   “Give me a drink of Southern Comfort,” I told Ruby, the bartender, and watched to see if he would notice anything amiss.

  Ruby, a thin sly Chinese-type Negro, took the bottle without noticing the tendril, which broke off in his hand.

  “How long has that vine been here?”

  “What vine?”

  “In your hand.”

  He shrugged.

  “How long has it been since anybody asked for Southern Comfort?”

  “It been a while,” said Ruby with a sly smile. “Christmas gif, Doc.”

  Absently I gave him a bill, a dollar.

  Ruby’s face went inscrutable like an Oriental’s. He expected, rightly, a higher tip at Christmas. The dollar was received as an insult. We dislike each other. He sucked his teeth. Leaving him and my drink, I went out among the catfish crowd and found myself hemmed up with Lola Rhoades against a stretch of artificially wormholed cypress.

  The pro shop seems to darken in the morning light. Gene Sarazen straightens. I sit on a pedestal holding a display of irons arranged in a fan. There is a chill in the room. The summer spins back to chilly azalea crucifixion spring, back further to Christmas with its month of cheerful commercial jingling shopping nights and drinking parties.

  I see Lola clearly, holding her gin fizz.

  “I am glad to see you,” says Lola, who is five feet nine and in her high heels looks me straight in the eye and says what she thinks.

  “So am I,” I say, feeling a wonder that there should be such a thing as a beautiful six-foot woman who is glad to see me. Women are mythical creatures. They have no more connection with the ordinary run of things than do centaurs. I see her clearly, gin fizz in one hand, the other held against her sacrum, palm out, pushing herself rhythmically off the wall. Women! Music! Love! Life! Joy! Gin fizzes!

  She is home for Christmas from Texas A & M. She looks like her father but the resemblance is a lovely joke, a droll commentary on him. His colorlessness, straw hair, straw skin, becomes in her a healthy pallor, milkiness over rose, lymph over blood. Her hair is a black-auburn with not enough red to ruin her skin, which has none of the green chloral undertones of some redheads. Her glance is mild and unguarded. It is the same to her whether she drinks or does not drink, talks or does not talk, looks one in the eye or does not look.

  She drinks and hisses a cello tune in her teeth and pushes herself off the wall.

  The gin fizzes come and go. We find we can look into each other’s eyes without the usual fearfulness and shamefulness of eye meeting eye. I am in love.

  A Negro band, dressed in impressed Santa suits, is blasting out Christmas carols. Bridge-playing ladies surround us, not playing bridge but honking their Wednesday bridge-playing honks and uttering Jewish-guttural yuchs which are fashionable this season.

  Lola asks me something. I cannot hear and, stooping, put my ear to her mouth, registering as I go past a jeweled reflection of red and green Christmas lights in a web of saliva spinning between parted rows of perfect teeth.

  “Don’t you want to ask about your patient?”

  “You look well. How are you?” I had treated her last summer for a mild depression and a sensation of strangeness, quite common these days, upon waking in the morning.

  “Well enough,” she says, nodding in order to lever her sacrum off the wall. “But you seem—odd.”

  “Odd?” I speak into her ear, which crimsons in the canal like a white orchid.

  “You look both happy and—sad.”

  It is true. Women are so smart. In truth I am suffering from simultaneous depression and exaltation. So I tell her about it: that this very day I perfected my invention and finished my article, which will undoubtedly be recognized as one of the three great scientific breakthroughs of the Christian era, the others being Newton hitting on his principles and Einstein on his field theory, perhaps even the greatest of all because my discovery alone gives promise of bridging the dread chasm between body and mind that has sundered the soul of Western man for five hundred years.

  She believes me. “Then why do you feel bad?”

  I explain my symptoms in terms of my discovery: that when one records the thalamic radiation, a good index of one’s emotional state, it can register either as a soaring up, a sine curve, or a dipping down, a cosine curve. “Mine registers both at the same time, sine and cosine, mountain on a valley.”

  She laughs, thinking I am joking.

  “Why should that be?”

  Since I am in love, I can feel with her, feel my sacrum tingle when hers hits the wall.

  “Well, I’ve won, you see. Won the big one. But it’s Christmas Eve and I’m alone. My family is dead. There’s nobody to tell.”

  “Tell me:”

  “Do you know what I planned to do tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Go home and watch Perry Como’s Christmas show on stereo-V.” Perry Como is seventy and still going strong.

  Lola nods sympathetically, ducks her head, drinks, and hisses a tune in her teeth. I bend to listen. It is the Dvořák cello concerto.

  Trays pass. I begin to drink Ramos gin fizzes with one swallow. At one time I was allergic to egg white but that was long ago. These drinks feel silky and benign. The waiters too are dressed as Santa. They grin sideways from their skewed Santa hoods and shout “Christmas gif!” I give them money, a dollar, ten dollars, whatever.

  “Listen to this,” I tell Lola and hum the Don Quixote theme in her ear.

  “Very good. You have absolute pitch. And you look better! Your face is fuller.”

  I feel my face. It is fuller.

  “I feel fine. I am never happier than when I am in love.”

  “Are you in love?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who with?”

  “You.”

  “Ah huh,” says Lola, nodding, but I can’t tell whether the nodding is just to get her sacrum off the wall.

  “Christmas gif!”

  Another black Santa passes and I take three gin fizzes. The tingling sacrum should have been a warning, but love made me happy, love and the sight of tiny jewels strung along the glittering web of saliva. Her membranes are clear as light, the body fluids like jeweler’s oil under a watch crystal. A lovely inorganic girl.

  Her company stabilizes me. Abstracted still, my orbit becomes lower. Bending close to her, close to the upper reaches of her breast, is like skimming in silence, power off, over the snowy slopes of Kilimanjaro. I close my eyes.

  “When I close my eyes, I can see you teaching cello in the Texas A & M cello class, a drafty gym-like room, the cello between your knees. It is during a break and you’re wearing a sweatshirt and resting your arm on the cello.”

  “Ah huh.” She nods. “It gets cold in there.” She believes everything I say, knowing it is true.

  Handing Lola her gin fizz, I touch her. A hive, a tiny red wheal, leaps out at the point of touch, as if to keep touch. The touch of her is, as they say, a thrill.

  “Why did you bring your physician’s bag here?” Lola asks me.

  “I haven’t been home yet. The first working model of my lapsometer is inside, can’t afford to lose it.”

  “Can you really measure a person’s innermost self?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Can you measure mine?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do it.”

  “Where? Right here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well—over here.” Taking her by the hand, I lead her through the bridge women to the pro shop. We stand behind Gene Sarazen while I take a few snapshots of her with my Brownie.

  She registers zero anxiety—music saves her! she goes dreaming through the world as safe and sure as Schubert’s trout—but her interpersonal wave is notable in two respects: it is both powerful and truncated, lopped off at the peak like Popocatepetl.

  “Well?”

  “You see?” I show her the snail tracks on jade, a faint cratered Fuji in a green dawn.

  “
What does that mean?”

  “It means you have a heart full of love and no one to give it to, but that is not so bad because you have your music, which means a great deal to you.”

  “Yes. I don’t. It does. Yes!”

  Now it is she who does the hemming up and I who am backed up against the cypress, sacrum fiery and quilted. My head is turning against the wormholes. Hairs catch and pop.

  “Why is that?” she asks, brown eyes level with mine.

  “Why is what?”

  “Why is there—no one?”

  “Well you’re a bit much, you know. You scare most men. Also, your music is hard to compete with. You always hear singing.” I show her the lilting curve of her aesthetic radiation.

  “Yes! I understand! It is true! Can love be like that?”

  She takes my hand urgently, her cello calluses whispering in my palm.

  “Yes, it can, if the love is like that, singing.”

  “Do you love me like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do I know?”

  I kiss her hand. My lip leaps out to keep touch, ridges with a wheal.

  She feels it. “Good heavens!”

  We are laughing and touching.

  “Christmas gif!”

  A waiter comes up. We take four gin fizzes. Under the monk-like Santa hood, I recognize a Negro named Willard Amadie. Long ago he used to be a caddy, before the electric surreys came along. A very strong short black man, he would stand down the fairway for the drive and with the heavy bag still on his shoulder take a full swing at the clover with an iron. It is a surprise to see him. Years ago he went off to the Ecuadorian wars and became, I heard, a career soldier. Somber even as a youth, he’d stand waiting at the lie, club selected and proffered handle first, face bitter-black, bee-stung, welted laterally like an Indian’s.

  Now he’s dressed like Santa and grinning a ghastly grin.

  “Christmas gif, Doc!”

  I look at him.

  “What’s wrong, Willard?”

  “Nothing, Doc! Christmas gif to you and missee.”

  “Missee?” The outer corners of my eyes are filling up with hives, forming a prism. Willard and Lola are edged in rainbows. “What in hell are you talking about?”

  Willard doesn’t leave but stands watching. His sclerae are yellow as egg yolk. At last I give Willard ten dollars, blushing, as I do so, with rage or shame, I’m not sure which.