Love in the Ruins

by Walker Percy

  But, unlike a visiting nurse, she undresses. As briskly as a housewife getting ready for her evening bath and paying no more attention to the viewing mirror than if it were her vanity, she sheds jacket, skirt, underwear—the lower article a kind of stretch step-in garment, the upper a brassiere with a bodice-like extension—and finally her up-arched beret, holding a bobby pin in her teeth and giving her short dark hair a shake as any woman would. Not fat, she is heavy-legged and heavy-breasted, her olive skin running to pigment. Though there is glass between us, there is the sense, almost palpable, of the broad, low, barefooted heft of her, of a clothed-in cottoned-off body heat and of the keratin-rasp of her bare feet on the cork floor.

  Now, clipping Lucite fittings to sensor wires—and again with the impression of holding a bobby pin in her teeth—she inserts one after another into the body orifices, as handily and thriftily as a teen-ager popping in a contact lens.

  Cameras whir, tapes jerk around, needles quiver, computers wink, and Lillian begins her autostimulation.

  My eyes meet Moira’s. She blushes and glances down. Here we meet, at Lillian’s recording session, as shyly as two office workers at the water cooler, touch fingers and—! Yes, my hand strays along the vaginal computer, our fingers touch. A thrill pierces my heart like an arrow, as they say in old novels. I am in love.

  Stryker tells me his problem, I listen attentively, and sure enough he offers me a job. It disconcerts me that he speaks in a loud voice, in the hearing of the others, and pays no attention to Lillian, who is doing her usual yeoman-like job. Isn’t it impolite not to watch her? Stryker is a tall, willowy doctor who feels obliged by the nature of his work to emphasize the propriety, even the solemnity of his own person. So he dresses somewhat like a funeral director in a dark suit, perfectly laundered shirt, and sober tie. Yet there persists about him the faint air of the dude: his collar has a tricky pin that lofts the knot of his tie. Overly long cuffs show their jeweled links and cover part of his hand, whose fingers are still withered from his years as a chemist before he went into behavior. He is a wonderful dancer, hopping nimbly through the complicated figures of the Center’s square dances. Even now, in the observation room, there is about him a lightness of foot, a discreet bounciness, as if he were keeping time to an inner hoedown. His foot swings out. Yet there pervades the observation room a strong tone, at once solemn and brisk. Embarrassment is not to be thought of. Nor, on the other hand, would it be thinkable to crack vulgar jokes as surgeons do in the scrub room.

  Dr. Helga Heine has caught the same note of brisk solemnity. She is a jolly matronly Bavarian gynecologist, neither young nor old, a regular hausfrau, hair done up in a bun, breast conformed to a single motherly outcurve. Moira tells me that Helga takes pains to remember the birthdays of staff members and veteran performers, brings a cake and plays Zwei Herzen on her little Bavarian guitar. I gaze big-nosed at her plump pink fingertips.

  “Thanks to you,” says Stryker solemnly, balancing lightly on the balls of his feet, “we’ve made a breakthrough in the whole area of sexual behavior.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say—” I begin, sweeping out a foot like Stryker. So he’s read my paper! In the corner of my eye Moira listens and registers pride. To Moira, who believes in Science without knowing much about it, my triumph has all the grace and warrant of a matador’s.

  “Your article in the J.A.M.A. delineated a new concept.”

  “Oh. I wouldn’t say that.”

  And I wouldn’t. The “article” he speaks of is not the epochal paper I just finished, but a minor clinical note, small potatoes indeed. It noted nothing more than a certain anomaly in the alpha wave of solitary lovers (as Colley’s assistant, I read the EEG’s of all the lovemakers in Love). Stryker’s praise is something like congratulating Einstein for patenting a Swiss watch. I accept it for Moira’s sake.

  Moira’s eyes are shining.

  Lillian is going about her task at a fair clip. Drums revolve, heartbeats spike on a monitor, her skin conductivity ascends a gentle slope. Stryker keeps a casual eye on the dials, now and then dictates a clinical note to Moira. Helga and Father Kev Kevin, hearing my praises, look glum.

  Moira perches on her stool, heels cocked on a rung, and manages both to take notes and keep her short skirt tucked under her knees. What lovely legs. Her kneecaps are smooth and tan as a beaten biscuit. To plant kisses on those perfect little biscuits, I’m thinking, as Stryker dances a step. Moira and I do not quite look at each other but my cheek is aware of hers.

  She never told her love

  But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud

  Feed on her damask cheek.

  Lillian is going at a good clip now.

  “There’s the old methodology,” says Stryker, waving a hand at Lillian without bothering to look. “Thanks to you, we’re onto something new.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I murmur out of Moira’s hearing.

  “Not that the old wasn’t useful in its way—”

  “Useful!” chime in Helga and Father Kev Kevin. “Useful enough to take the Nobel!”

  But Stryker waves them off. “Useful, yes, to a point But without your note on the alpha wave, we’d never have struck out on a new path.”

  “A new path?” I ask, puzzled. But my Moira-wards cheek glows.

  Her cheek like the rose is, but fresher, I ween,

  She’s the loveliest lassie that trips on the green.

  I ween she is.

  Stryker sways closer, balancing lightly on his toes. “I think you might be interested to learn, Tom, that since June we’ve been using not one subject at a time”—he touches my arm with a withered finger—“but two.”

  “Two?”

  “Yes. A man and a woman. Here’s the breakthrough.”

  “Breakthrough?”

  “Yes. And guess what?”

  “What?”

  “We’ve got rid of your alpha wave anomaly. You were right.”

  “Very good. But actually I was only reading EEG’s and not making recommendations about future techniques, you understand—”

  “Moral scruples, Doctor?” asks Father Kev Kevin, eyes alight. He clears the orgasm circuit

  “Perhaps.”

  “Oh, that’s neither here nor there!” cries Stryker cheerfully. “All I’m saying is that using couples instead of singles we’ve got rid of your alpha wave anomaly and kept the cruciform rash. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Yes,” I say gloomily, watching Lillian. My nose is getting bigger. I try to think. “Then if that’s the case, what’s your problem?”

  “Yeah, here’s the thing.” Stryker glances at Lillian like a good cook watches a pot of beans. I notice that as Lillian progresses, Stryker becomes ever more light-footed. His black pumps swing out. His watching Lillian is like a poet reading his best poem. “Our problem is that our couples do not perform regularly.”

  “Ted ’n Tanya do!” Helga objects.

  “Not lately. Only one out of four couples interact successfully,” says Stryker drily. “Hardly an adequate base for observation.”

  “Ted ’n Tanya?” I ask, scratching my head. There could only be one Ted ’n Tanya. It must mean that my prescription for Ted didn’t, in the end, work, and that they’ve come here. “But what do you think I can do about it?”

  Lillian seems to be looking at me. But I know she can only see mirror. It is herself she is watching. Her eyes are unfocused and faraway. Her eyebrows are unplucked, the heavy black sort one used to see in daguerreotypes of frontier women.

  “Do some studies on our noninteracting couples!” cries Stryker. “I hear you’ve developed a special sort of EEG.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Join our team! We’re even funded for a full-time consultant.”

  “Well, thank you, Ken, but …” On the other hand, I could see Moira all day if I did.

  “Twenty thousand a year, full professorship, and do as you please.”

  “Well …”

>   “We’ve hit a snag in the interpersonal area and both Max and I feel you could iron it out.”

  “The fact is …” What does Moira’s cheek say, my cheek wonders.

  “Here-we-are,” says Stryker in a routine rush, glancing at Lillian. All the quiet pride of a scientist demonstrating his best trick.

  The Love team springs into action, each to his station.

  Lillian turns to show her famous cruciform rash. She embraces herself. Her pale loins bloom. Stryker presses buttons with a routine skill, a practiced climactic.

  “Beautiful!” murmurs Helga.

  “Pathognomonic!” cries Father Kev Kevin.

  Moira bends to her note-taking, scribbles furiously as Stryker dictates.

  Helga speaks by microphone to Lillian.

  “Turn around slowly, dear.”

  She addresses the unseen students, perched in their roost above us.

  “You will notice please the cruciform morbilliform eruption extending bilaterally from the sacral area—”

  Moira breaks her pencil and goes to sharpen it. The others are busy with Lillian and I see my chance. I follow her into a small closet-sized room, which houses a computer and a cot littered with dusty scientific journals. A metal label on the door reads Observer Stimulation Overflow Area. Standard equipment in all Love clinics. Known more familiarly to the students as the “chicken room,” it is provided to accommodate those observers who are stimulated despite themselves by the behavior they observe. For although, as Stryker explained, the observer hopes to retain his scientific objectivity, it must be remembered that after all the observers belong to the same species as the observed and are subject to the same “environmental stimuli.” Hither to the closet, alone or in pairs or severally, observers may discreetly repair, each to relieve himself or herself according to his needs. “It iss the same as a doctor having hiss own toilet, nicht?” Helga told me somewhat vulgarly. “Nicht,” I said but did not argue. I have other fish to fry.

  While moral considerations are not supposed to enter into scientific investigation, “observer stimulation overflow” is nevertheless discouraged. It is Stryker’s quiet boast, moreover, that whatever may happen in Palo Alto or Berkeley or Copenhagen, scientific objectivity has been scrupulously preserved in the Paradise Love Clinic. No observer has ever used the chicken room. The closet houses not lovers but dusty journals and a computer.

  Moira, in fact, tells me she feels safer in Love than when she worked as secretary to the chief psychologist.

  “Can I see you after work today?” I whisper and take her hand. It is cold. Che gelida manina. Thy tiny hand is frozen.

  “Can’t today!” she whispers back. “But I can’t wait till the Fourth! Where are we going?” Her lovely gold eyes look at me over her steno pad like a Moslem woman’s.

  I frown. An ugly pang pierces my heart. Why can’t she see me today? Does she have a date with Buddy? Here’s the misery of love: I don’t really want to see her today, was not prepared to, have other plans, yet despite myself hear myself insist on it.

  “But—”

  She shushes me, seals my lips with her finger, and, glancing through the open door at Lillian who is unwiring herself, brushes her lips with her fingers, brushes mine.

  “You better go.”

  “Yes.” Ah.

  Returning to the observation room, I sink into a chair and dreamily watch Lillian dress. Here’s my trouble with Moira. She’s a romanticist and I’m not. She lives for what she considers rare perfect moments. What I long to share with her are ordinary summer evenings, cicadas in the sycamores.

  She whispers behind me. “Where are we going this time? To Dry Tortugas again? Chicken Itza? Tombstone?”

  I shrug and smile. She likes to visit ghost towns and jungle ruins, so I’ll show her the one in our back yard, the ruined Howard Johnson motel. She’ll savor the closeness of it. One weekend we flew to Silver City, Arizona, and stood in the deserted saloon and watched tumbleweeds blow past the door. “Can’t you just hear the old rinky-dink piano?” she cried and hugged me tight “Yeah,” I said, taking delight in the very commonplaceness of her romanticism. “How about a glass of red-eye, Moira?” “Oh yes! Yes indeed!”

  Lillian dresses quickly, pins on her Lois Lane hat, using the viewing mirror as her vanity, shoulders her bag, trudges out

  In comes the next subject. No, subjects. A couple. I recognize one, a medical student who is doubtlessly making money as a volunteer. He is J.T. Thigpen, a slightly built, acned youth who wears a blue shirt with cuffs turned up one turn. He carries a stack of inky books in the crook of his wrist. His partner, whom the chart identifies only as Gloria, is a largish blonde, a lab worker, to judge from her stained smock, with wiry bronze hair that springs out from her head. Volunteers in Love get paid fifty dollars a crack, which beats giving blood.

  “These kids are our pioneers,” Stryker tells me, speaking softly now for some reason. “And a case in point. Something has gone wrong. Yet they were our first and best interaction subjects. Our problem, of course, with using two subjects was one of visualization. Colley, who is a wizard, solved that for us with his Lucite devices. We can see around curves, you see, between bodies. So we figured if Colley could help us out in mechanics, you could help us out with interpersonal breakdowns. How about it?”

  “Well …”

  Gloria and J.T. are undressing. J.T. takes off his shirt, revealing an old-fashioned undershirt with shoulder straps. He’s a country boy from hereabouts. The spots of acne strewn across his shoulders turn livid in the fluorescent light. Removing his wristwatch with expansion band, he hesitates for a moment, then hangs it on the crank handle of the hospital bed.

  Gloria wears a half-slip, which comes just short of her plump white knees, and a half-brassiere whose upper cusps are missing.

  “Okay, keeds!” cries Helga, clapping her hands into the microphone. “Mach schnell! Let’s get the show on the road!”

  “We have found,” Stryker explains to me, “that you can inspire false modesty and that by the same token a brisk no-nonsense approach works wonders. Helga is great at it!”

  I clear my throat and stretch up my heavy-lidded eyes. My nose is a snout.

  “I’ve got to be going.”

  J.T. and Gloria, half-undressed, are standing around like strangers at a bus stop. J.T. sends his fingers browsing over his acned shoulder. Gloria stands foursquare, arms angled out past her hips as if she were carrying milkpails.

  Father Kev Kevin clears the orgasm circuit. He won’t look at me.

  “I’ve got to be going, Stryker.”

  “Wait. How can you spot the hangup if you don’t watch them?”

  “Yeah. Well, later. Thank you very much, all of you. Hm. I’m already late—” I look at my watch and start for the door.

  “Wait! Ted ’n Tanya are next. They’re our best. Or were. Don’t you want to—”

  “No.”

  “What about the job?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “We’re funded, man! The money is here!”

  “Very good.”

  Leaving, I catch a final glimpse of J.T. Thigpen, bare-chested and goose-pimpled, gazing around the porcelain walls with the ruminant rapt expression of a naked draftee.

  “Mach schnell! Keeds—” cries Helga, clapping her hands.

  Whew! Escape! Escape, but just in time to run squarely into Buddy Brown, my enemy, in the corridor.

  He smiles and nods and grips my arms as if we shared a lover’s secret. What secret? Who is he waiting for?

  I brush past and do not wait to find out. Am I afraid to find out?

  8

  To the motel to fix a room for a tryst with Moira on the Fourth. No sign of sniper or anyone else for that matter. But I take no chances, slip into Howard Johnson’s through the banquet room where the rent Rotary banner still flies from Tuesday’s meeting five years ago:

  Is it the truth?

  Is it fair to all concerned?

 
; Will it build goodwill and better friendships?

  and straight up the inside stairs without exposing myself to the patio.

  Room 203, the most nearly intact, was nevertheless a mess when we first saw it: graffiti, illuminations of hairy pudendae, suspicious scraps of newspaper littering the floor. The beds moldy, the toilet fouled. I’ve been working on the room for a month, installed a generator for air-conditioner and TV and coffee-maker and lights and bed vibrators; brought in hose water from Esso station next door; laid in supplies for a day or so.

  And I haven’t finished. This weekend, knowing what I know, I’ll lay in supplies for six months, plus clothes for Moira, books, games. All hell will break loose on the Fourth and Moira and I may need a place to stay. What safer place than a motel in no man’s land, between the lines so to speak?

  This is the place. Moira, in fact, picked it. She and I came here for a few minutes last month. She likes the byways. That weekend we hadn’t time to fly to Merida or Tombstone. So we took a walk. A proper ruin this, and what is more, it has a bad reputation and people don’t come here. But I think it is safe. The whites think the black guerrillas have it. The blacks think the white drug-heads have it. Neither wants any part of the other, so both stay away. I think.

  Moira was delighted with the motel. There was a soupçon of danger, just enough. She clutched my arm and shrank against me. We stood by the scummy pool. Spanish moss trailed from the balcony. Alligator grass choked the wading pool. A scarlet watersnake coiled under the lifeguard’s perch. Moira found a pair of old 1960 harlequin glasses and an ancient vial of Coppertone.

  “It’s like Pompey!” she cried.

  “Like what? Yes, right.”

  We kissed. Ruins make her passionate. Ghosts make her want to be touched. She is lovely, her quick upturned heart-shaped face and gold-brown eyes bright with a not quite genuine delight, a willingness rather to be delighted. Are you going to delight me? isn’t this the time? aren’t things falling out just right? Pleasing her is fathoming and fulfilling this expectation. Her face. Her cropped wheat-colored hair with a strong nap that aches my hand to brush against, her rather short tanned perfect legs drawn with strong simple strokes like the Draw Me girl in magazine contests. She’s poor, having left her West Virginia parents early and supported herself in civil service, worked in Bethesda for N.I.M.H. before transferring here. I can see her in Washington in the evening washing out her things in the washstand, keeping her budget, minding herself… . But she has her own views and likes. She opposes the war in Ecuador, subscribes to Playgirl, a mildly liberated, mildly Left magazine, and carries in her purse a pocket edition of Rod McKuen, a minor poet of the old Auto Age, which she likes to read aloud to me: “Don’t you just love that?” “Yes.” But what I love is her loving it, her faintly spurious love of loving things that seem lovable.