The Moviegoer (8 page)

I speak several times by telephone with my aunt and with Kate. Kate seems better and my aunt is pleased and gives me the credit. She has made an appointment for Kate with Dr Mink and Kate has consented to go. When Kate calls me, she takes her analytic tone. It is something of a strain for both of us. For some reason or other she feels obliged to keep one jump ahead of the conventional. When I answer the phone, instead of hearing “Hello, this is Kate,” there comes into my ear a low-pitched voice saying something like: “Well, the knives have started flying,” which means that she and her mother have been aggressive toward each other; or: “What do you know? I'm celebrating the rites of spring after all,” which turns out to mean that she has decided, in her ironic and reflected way, to attend the annual supper given for former queens of the Neptune ball. This is something of a strain for both of us, as I say, but I am glad to hear from her. To tell the truth, I am somewhat worried about her, more so than her stepmother is. Kate is trapping herself too often: hitting upon a way out, then slamming the door upon herself. She has broken her engagement with Walter. But her stepmother understands, and Walter too, it seems. He stands by loyally to do what he can—it is none other than Walter, in fact, who will drive her to the hotel for the queens' supper. All seems well, but Kate is uneasy. “They think they're helping me, but they aren't,” comes the low voice in my ear. “How much better it would be if they weren't so damn understanding—if they kicked me out of the house. To find yourself out in the street with two dollars to your name, to catch the streetcar downtown and get a job, perhaps as an airline stewardess. Think how wonderful it would be to fly to Houston and back three times a week for the next twenty years. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. It would be wonderful.” “Then why don't you walk out of the house and get yourself a job?” I ask her. There comes a silence, then a click. But this doesn't mean anything. Abrupt hang-ups are a part of our analytic way of talking.

Sharon seems to pay no attention to these alexandrine conversations, even though we occupy the same small office and she is close enough to touch. Today she wears a sleeveless dress of yellow cotton; her arms come out of the armholes as tenderly as a little girl's. But when she puts her hand to her hair, you see that it is quite an arm. The soft round muscle goes slack of its own weight. Once she slapped a fly with her bare hand and set my Artmetal desk ringing like a gong. Her back is turned to me, but obliquely, so that I can see the line of her cheek with its whorl of down and the Slavic prominence under the notch of her eye and the quick tender incurve, shortening her face like a little mignon. There is on her desk a snapshot of her father and it is this very crowding of the cheekbone into the eye socket, narrowing the eye into a squint-eyed almost Chinese treacherousness, which is so ugly in him and so beautiful in her. As she types, the little kidney-shaped cushion presses against the small of her back in a nice balance of thrusts.

I am in love with Sharon Kincaid. She knows nothing of this, I think. I have not asked her for a date nor even been specially friendly. On the contrary: I have been aloof and correct as a Nazi officer in occupied Paris. Yet when she came in this morning unshouldering her Guatemalan bag and clearing her hair from her short collar, I heard a soughing sound in my ears like a desert wind. The Guatemalan bag contains
Peyton Place,
I happen to know. She had it when she applied for the job, a drugstore-library copy which she held under her purse. Ever since, the bag has been heavy with it—I can tell by the swing of it. She reads it at her lunch in the A & G cafeteria. Her choice in literature I took to be a good omen at the time, but I have changed my mind. My Sharon should not read this kind of stuff.

Her person has acquired a priceless value to me. For the first time I understand the conceits of the old poets: how I envy thee, little kidney-shaped cushion! Oh, to take thy place and press in thy stead against the sweet hollow of her back, etc. The other day Frank Hebert from Savings & Loan next door was complaining about his overhead: his rent was so much, his office girl such and such. To think of it: Sharon Kincaid as an item on a list, higher than the janitor, lower than the rent. Yet I dare not raise her salary, though before long I shall and with reason. She is a first-class secretary, quicker to learn than either Marcia or Linda. Only this much do I know from the interview: she comes from Barbour County, Alabama; she attended Birmingham Southern for two years; her mother and father left the farm and are divorced; her mother sells Real Silk hosiery and often visits Sharon but does not live with her. Sharon lives in a rooming house on Esplanade. Her roommate works for Alcoa. One night I drove by the house, a tall narrow pile with blue windows and a display of plumbing fixtures on the ground floor.

Toward her I keep a Gregory Peckish sort of distance. I am a tall black-headed fellow and I know as well as he how to keep to myself, make my eyes fine and my cheeks spare, tuck my lip and say a word or two with a nod or two.

It is just as well I keep my distance. Today it is louder than ever, this mistral whistling in my ears. I am nearly sick with it. Desire for her is like a sorrow in my heart. Ten minutes ago she rolled backwards in her little chair to hand me a letter and did not even touch me, but there singing about me was Rosenkavalier and here was the yellow-cotton smell of her and of the summer to come. Once she did touch my hand with the warm ventral flesh of her forearm: sparks flew past the corner of my eye and I actually became dizzy.

Today I read
Arabia Deserta
enclosed in a Standard & Poor binder. She conceals
Peyton Place;
I conceal
Arabia Deserta.

Pleasant, as the fiery heat of the daylight is done, is our homely evening fire. The sun goes down upon a highland steppe of Arabia, whose common altitude is above three thousand feet, the thin dry air is presently refreshed, the sand is soon cold; wherein yet at three fingers' depth is left the sunny warmth of the past day's heat until the new sunrise. After a half hour it is the blue night, and a clear hoary starlight in which there shines the girdle of the milky way, with a marvellous clarity. As the sun is setting, the nomad housewife brings in a truss of sticks and dry bushes, which she has pulled or hoed with a mattock (a tool they have seldom) in the wilderness; she casts down this provision by our hearthside, for the sweet-smelling evening fire.

There was a time when this was the last book on earth I'd have chosen to read. Until recent years, I read only “fundamental” books, that is, key books on key subjects, such as
War and Peace,
the novel of novels;
A Study of History
, the solution of the problem of time; Schroedinger's
What is Life?
, Einstein's
The Universe as I See It
, and such. During those years I stood outside the universe and sought to understand it. I lived in my room as an Anyone living Anywhere and read fundamental books and only for diversion took walks around the neighborhood and saw an occasional movie. Certainly it did not matter to me where I was when I read such a book as
The Expanding Universe.
The greatest success of this enterprise, which I call my vertical search, came one night when I sat in a hotel room in Birmingham and read a book called
The Chemistry of Life.
When I finished it, it seemed to me that the main goals of my search were reached or were in principle reachable, whereupon I went out and saw a movie called
It
Happened One Night
which was itself very good. A memorable night. The only difficulty was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over. There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still obliged to draw one breath and then the next. But now I have undertaken a different kind of search, a horizontal search. As a consequence, what takes place in my room is less important. What is important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wander in the neighborhood. Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.

Sharon turns not one hair as I talk with my aunt about Kate in our old Feliciana style of talking and as I talk to Kate in our analytic style of talking. Yet she recognizes each voice and passes the phone back with a “Miz Cutrer” or a “Miss Cutrer.” Now, as she answers the phone again, it crosses my mind that she may not be entirely unselfconscious: she tilts her head and puts her pencil to her cheek like the secretary in the Prell commercial. She presses the mouthpiece against her chest.

“Mr Sartalamaccia called earlier. I forgot.”

“Is that he?”

She nods. Her agate eyes watch me. I think it over Gregory-Peckishly and hold out a hand with no time for her.

It is a matter of no importance. Mr Sartalamaccia wants to buy some land, my patrimony in fact, a worthless parcel of swamp in St Bernard Parish. He offers eight thousand dollars. It is enough to say yes here and now, but a Gregorish Peckerish idea pops into my head. I propose to Mr Sartalamaccia that he meet me on the site at ten thirty tomorrow morning. He sounds disappointed.

“Miss Kincaid, I'll want you to come down with me to St Bernard Parish tomorrow and copy a title in the courthouse.” In truth it would be interesting to see how much my father paid for it. Any doings of my father, even his signature, is in the nature of a clue in my search.

“St Bernard Parish?” To my Sharon, fresh from Eufala, I might just as well have said Mont Saint Michel.

“We'll be back here by one.”

“Just as long as I get back uptown by seven thirty tomorrow night.”

Now I am Gregory-grim and no fooling this time. What the devil. Three weeks in New Orleans and she's already having dates?

2

CUSTOMERS COME IN
after hours and it is late evening when I leave the office. Unlike the big downtown brokers, most of our clients are storekeepers and employed people. It is a source of satisfaction to me to make money. Not even Sharon or
Arabia Deserta
interferes with this. Another idea occurred to me yesterday as I read about Khalil in the high plateau country of the Negd. What gives it merit is that it should not only make money; it should also bring me closer to Sharon. I shall discuss it with her tomorrow. My first idea was the building itself. It looks like a miniature bank with its Corinthian pilasters, portico and iron scrolls over name, Cutrer, Klostermann & Lejier is lettered in Gothic and below in smaller letters, the names of the Boston mutual funds we represent. It looks far more conservative than the modern banks in Gentilly. It announces to the world: modern methods are no doubt excellent but here is good old-fashioned stability, but stability with imagination. A little bit of old New England with a Creole flavor. The Parthenon façade cost twelve thousand dollars but commissions have doubled. The young man you see inside is clearly the soul of integrity; he asks no more than to be allowed to plan your future. This is true. This is all I ask.

The sun has set but the sky is luminous and clear and apple green in the east. Nothing is left of the smog but a thumb-smudge over Chef Menteur. Bullbats hawk the insects in the warm air next to the pavement. They dive and utter their thrumming
skonk-skonk
and go sculling up into the bright upper air. I stop at the corner of Elysian Fields to buy a paper from Ned Daigle. Ned is a former jockey and he looks quite a bit like Leo Carroll but older and more dried-up. “What seh, Jackie,” he calls in his hoarse bass, as hoarse as the bullbats, and goes humping for the cars, snapping the papers into folds as he goes. He catches the boulevard traffic at the stoplight and often sells half a dozen papers before the light changes. Ned knows everybody at the Fairgrounds including all the local hoods and racketeers. During racing season he often brings them around to my office. For some reason or other he thinks my brokerage business is a virtuous and deserving institution, something like a church. The gangsters too; quite a few of them buy growth funds for their children. Uncle Jules would be astonished if he knew some of his customers who own Massachusetts Investors Trust.

“Is it going to be clear for Carnival, Jackie?”

We stand on the concrete island between the double streams of traffic. The light changes and off Ned goes again.

Evening is the best time in Gentilly. There are not so many trees and the buildings are low and the world is all sky. The sky is a deep bright ocean full of light and life. A mare's tail of cirrus cloud stands in high from the Gulf. High above the Lake a broken vee of ibises points for the marshes; they go suddenly white as they fly into the tilting salient of sunlight. Swifts find a windy middle reach of sky and come twittering down so fast I think at first gnats have crossed my eyelids. In the last sector of apple green a Lockheed Connie lowers from Mobile, her running lights blinking in the dusk. Station wagons and Greyhounds and diesel rigs rumble toward the Gulf Coast, their fabulous tail-lights glowing like rubies in the darkening east. Most of the commercial buildings are empty except the filling stations where attendants hose down the concrete under the glowing discs and shells and stars.

On the way home I stop off at the Tivoli. It is a Jane Powell picture and I have no intention of seeing it. However, Mr Kinsella the manager sees me and actually pulls me in by the coatsleeve for a sample look. He says it is a real pleaser and he means it. There go Jane and some fellow walking arm in arm down the street in a high wide and handsome style and doing a wake up and sing number. The doorman, the cop on the corner, the taxi driver, each sunk in his own private misery, smile and begin to tap their feet. I am hardly ever depressed by a movie and Jane Powell is a very nice-looking girl, but the despair of it is enough to leave you gone in the stomach. I look around the theater. Mr Kinsella has his troubles too. There are only a few solitary moviegoers scattered through the gloom, the afternoon sort and the most ghostly of all, each sunk in his own misery, Jane or no Jane. On the way out I stop at the ticket window and speak to Mrs de Marco, a dark thin worried lady who has worked here ever since I moved to Gentilly. She does not like the movies and takes no pleasure in her job (though she could see most of the last show every night). I tell her that it is a very fine job and that I would like nothing better than sitting out here night after night and year after year and watch the evenings settle over Elysian Fields, but she always thinks I am kidding and we talk instead about her son's career in the air force. He is stationed in Arizona and he hates the desert. I am sorry to hear this because I would like it out there very much. Nevertheless I am interested in hearing about it. Before I see a movie it is necessary for me to learn something about the theater or the people who operate it, to touch base before going inside. That is the way I got to know Mr Kinsella: engaging him in conversation about the theater business. I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see. Do not misunderstand me. I am no do-gooding Jose Ferrer going around with a little whistle to make people happy. Such do-gooders do not really want to listen, are not really selfish like me; they are being nice fellows and boring themselves to death, and their listeners are not really cheered up. Show me a nice Jose cheering up an old lady and I'll show you two people existing in despair. My mother often told me to be unselfish, but I have become suspicious of the advice. No, I do it for my own selfish reasons. If I did not talk to the theater owner or the ticket seller, I should be lost, cut loose metaphysically speaking. I should be seeing one copy of a film which might be shown anywhere and at any time. There is a danger of slipping clean out of space and time. It is possible to become a ghost and not know whether one is in downtown Loews in Denver or suburban Bijou in Jacksonville. So it was with me.