The Moviegoer (21 page)

Now, picking up speed, we gain the swamp. Kate and I sway against each other and watch the headlights of the cars on the swamp road, winking through the moss like big yellow lightning bugs.

The drowsiness returns. It is unwelcome. I recognize it as the sort of fitful twilight which has come over me of late, a twilight where waking dreams are dreamed and sleep never comes.

The man next to me is getting off in St Louis. When the conductor comes to collect our tickets, he surrenders a stub: he is going home. His suit is good. He sits with his legs crossed, one well-clad haunch riding up like a ham, his top leg held out at an obtuse angle by the muscle of his calf. His brown hair is youthful (he himself is thirty-eight or forty) and makes a cowlick in front. With the cowlick and the black eyeglasses he looks quite a bit like the actor Gary Merrill and has the same certified permission to occupy pleasant space with his pleasant self. In ruddy good health, he muffles a hearty belch in a handkerchief. This very evening, no doubt, he has had an excellent meal at Galatoire's, and the blood of his portal vein bears away a golden harvest of nutrient globules. When he first goes through his paper, he opens it like a book and I have no choice but to read the left page with him. We pause at an advertisement of a Bourbon Street nightclub which is a picture of a dancer with an oiled body. Her triceps arch forward like a mare's. For a second we gaze heavy-lidded and pass on. Now he finds what he wants and folds his paper once, twice and again, into a neat packet exactly two columns wide, like a subway rider in New York. Propping it against his knee, he takes out a slender gold pencil, makes a deft one-handed adjustment, and underlines several sentences with straight black lines (he is used to underlining). Dreaming at his shoulder, I can make out no more than

In order to deepen and enrich the marital—

It is a counseling column which I too read faithfully.

The train sways through the swamp. The St Louisan, breathing powerfully through the stiff hairs of his nose, succeeds in sitting in such a manner, tilted over on his right hip and propped against himself, that his thigh forms a secure writing platform for the packet.

The voices in the car become fretful. It begins to seem that the passengers have ridden together for a long time and have developed secret understandings and old grudges. They speak crossly and elliptically to each other.

Staying awake is a kind of sickness and sleep is forever guarded against by a dizzy dutiful alertness. Waking wide-eyed dreams come as fitfully as swampfire.

Dr and Mrs Bob Dean autograph copies of their book
Technique in Marriage
in a Canal Street department store. A pair of beauties. I must have come in all the way from Gentilly, for I stand jammed against a table which supports a pyramid of books. I cannot take my eyes from the Deans: an oldish couple but still handsome and both, rather strangely, heavily freckled. As they wait for the starting time, they are jolly with each other and swap banter in the professional style of show people (I believe these preliminaries are called the warm-up). “No, we never argue,” says Bob Dean. “Because whenever an argument starts, we consult the chapter I wrote on arguments.” “No, dear,” says Jackie Dean. “It was I who wrote the chapter—” etc. Everyone laughs. I notice that nearly all the crowd jamming against me are women, firm middle-aged one-fifty pounders. Under drooping lids I watch the Deans, peculiarly affected by their routine which is staged so effortlessly that during the exchange of quips, they are free to cast business-like looks about them as if no one were present. But when they get down to business, they become as sober as Doukhobors and effuse an air of dedicated almost evangelical helpfulness. A copy of the book lies open on the table. I read: “Now with a tender regard for your partner remove your hand from the nipple and gently manipulate—” It is impossible not to imagine them at their researches, as solemn as a pair of brontosauruses, their heavy old freckled limbs about each other, hands probing skillfully for sensitive zones, pigmented areolas, out-of-the-way mucous glands, dormant vascular nexuses. A wave of prickling passes over me such as I have never experienced before.

My head, nodding like a daffodil, falls a good three inches toward the St Louisan before it jerks itself up. Kate sits shivering against me, but the St Louisan is as warm and solid as roast beef. As the train rocks along on its unique voyage through space-time, thousands of tiny thing-events bombard us like cosmic particles. Lying in a ditch outside is a scrap of newspaper with the date May 3, 1954. My Geiger counter clicks away like a teletype. But no one else seems to notice. Everyone is buried in his magazine. Kate is shaking like a leaf because she longs to be an anyone who is anywhere and she cannot.

The St Louisan reads a headline

SCIENTIST PREDICTS FUTURE IF

NUCLEAR ENERGY IS NOT MISUSED

Out comes the gold pencil to make a neat black box. After reading for a moment he comes back to the beginning and is about to make a second concentric box, thinks better of it, takes from his pocket a silver knife, undoes the scissors and clips the whole article, folds it and places it in his wallet. It is impossible to make out any of the underlined passages except the phrase: “the gradual convergence of physical science and social science.”

A very good phrase. I have to admire the St Louisan for his neat and well-ordered life, his gold pencil and his scissors-knife and his way of clipping articles on the convergence of the physical sciences and the social sciences; it comes over me that in the past few days my own life has gone to seed. I no longer eat and sleep regularly or write philosophical notes in my notebook and my fingernails are dirty. The search has spoiled the pleasure of my tidy and ingenious life in Gentilly. As late as a week ago, such a phrase as “hopefully awaiting the gradual convergence of the physical sciences and the social sciences” would have provoked no more than an ironic tingle or two at the back of my neck. Now it howls through the Ponchitoula Swamp, the very sound and soul of despair.

Kate has stopped shivering and when she lights up and starts smoking, I am certain she is better. But I am mistaken. “Oooh,” she says in a perfunctory workaday voice and starts forward again. The car lurches and throws her against Sidney's chair; there the train holds her fast: for three seconds she might be taken for a rapt onlooker of the gin-rummy game. Sidney rocks the deck against the polished wood until the cards are perfectly aligned. The gold ring on his little finger seems to serve as a device, a neat little fastening by means of which his hand movements are harnessed and made trim.

Half an hour passes and Kate does not return. I find her in her roomette, arms folded and face turned to the dark glass. We sit knee to knee.

“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.