The Moviegoer (11 page)

It turns out that Mr Sartalamaccia is a contractor and owns the housing development next door. He has done well and he wants my duck club for an addition. I ask about the houses.

“You want to see one?”

We follow him along a hog trail to a raw field full of pretty little flat-topped houses. He must show us one abuilding. I take pleasure in watching him run a thumb over the sawn edges of the sheathing. Sharon does not mind. She stands foursquare, eyes rolled back a little, showing white. She is sleepy-eyed and frumpy; she looks like snapshots of Ava Gardner when she was a high school girl in North Carolina.

“You know what's in this slab?” The concrete is smooth as silk.

“No.”

“Chance number six copper pipe. Nobody will ever know it's there but it will be there a long time.” I see that with him it is not purely and simply honesty; it is his own pleasure at thinking of good pipe in a good slab.

Back at the hummock, Mr Sartalamaccia takes me aside and holds his hat away to the east. “You see that ditcher and doozer?”

“Yes.”

“You know what that's going to be?”

“No.”

“That's the tidewater canal to the Gulf. You know how much our land is going to be worth?”

“How much?”

“Fifty dollars a foot.” Mr Sartalmaccia draws me close. Again he tells it as the veriest piece of news. Deal or no deal, this is a piece of news that bears telling.

Later Sharon tells me I was smart to trick him into revealing the true value of my duck club. But she is mistaken. It came about from the moment I met him that thenceforward it pleased him to speak of the past, of his strange odyssey in 1932 when he gazed at Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park and worked on the causeway to Key West and did not go hungry—it pleased him to speak with me of the past and to connive with me against the future. He speaks from his loneliness and together we marvel at the news of the canal and enjoy the consolation of making money. For money is a great joy.

Mr Sartalamaccia has become possessed by a secret hilarity. He gives me a poke in the ribs. “I'll tell you what we can do, Mr Bolling. You keep your land! I'll develop it for you. You make the offsite improvements. I'll build the houses. We'll make us some money.” He shrinks away in some kind of burlesque.

“How much do you think we can make?”

“Well I don't know. But I can tell you this.” Mr Sartalamaccia is hopping in a sort of goat dance and Sharon stands dreaming in the green darkness of the glade. “I'll give you fifteen thousand for it right now!”

Our name is Increase.

Sharon and I spin along the River Road. The river is high and the booms and stacks of ships ride up and down the levee like great earth engines.

In the Shell station and in a drift of honeysuckle sprouting through the oil cans and standing above Sharon with a Coke balanced on her golden knee, I think of flattening my hummock with bulldozers and it comes back to me how the old Gable used to work at such jobs: he knew how to seem to work and how to seem to forget about women: stand asweat with his hands in his back pockets.

It is a great joy to be with Sharon and to make money at it and to seem to pay no attention to her. As for Sharon: she finds nothing amiss in sitting in the little bucket seat with her knees doubled up in the sunshine, dress tucked under. An amber droplet of Coca-Cola meanders along her thigh, touches a blond hair, distributes itself around the tiny fossa.

“Aaauugh,” I groan aloud.

“What's the matter?”

“It is a stitch in the side.” It is a sword in the heart.

Sharon holds a hand against the sun to see me. “Mr Bolling?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember the price Mr Sartalamaccia first mentioned?”

“Eight thousand dollars.”

“He was really gon mess you up.”

“No he wasn't. But if it hadn't been for you, I'd have taken the eight thousand.”

“Me?”

“You got me to come down here.”

She assents doubtfully, casting back in her mind with one eye screwed up.

“Do you know how much you saved me, or rather made for me? At least seven thousand dollars and probably a great deal more. I'm obliged to give you ten percent.”

“You're not giving me any money, son.”

I have to laugh. “Why not?”

“Ain't nobody giving me any money.” (Now she catches herself and speaks broadly on purpose.) “I got plenty money.”

“How much money do you have?”

“Ne'mind.”

By flexing her leg at a certain angle, she can stand the Coke on a facet of her knee. What a structure it is, tendon and bone, facet and swell, and gold all over.

I go home as the old Gable, asweat and with no thought for her and sick to death with desire. She is pleased because, for one thing, she can keep quiet. I notice that it makes her uneasy to keep up a conversation.

She says only one more thing, tilting her head, eyes alight. “What about the court house?”

“It's too late. You didn't have to come. I'm sorry.”

“Listen!” she cries, as far away as Eufala itself. “I had a wonderful time!”

8

ONCE A WEEK,
on Fridays, all Cutrer salesmen return to the main office for a lunch conference with the staff. The week's business is reviewed, sales reports made, talks given on market conditions and coming issues presented by the underwriter. But today there is not much talk of business. Carnival is in full swing. Parades and balls go on night and day. A dozen krewes have already had their hour, and Proteus, Rex and Comus are yet to come. Partners and salesmen alike are red-eyed and abstracted. There is gossip about the identity of the king and queen of Iberia tonight (most of the staff of Cutrer, Klostermann and Lejier are members either of the Krewe of Neptune or the Krewe of Iberia). It is generally conceded that the king of Iberia will be James (Shorty) Jones, president of Middle Gulf Utilities, and the queen Winky Ouillibert, the daughter of Plauche Ouillibert of Southern Mutual. The choice is a popular one—I can testify that both men are able, likable and unassuming fellows.

Some Fridays, Uncle Jules likes to see me in his office after lunch. When he does, he so signifies by leaving his door open to the corridor so that I will see him at his desk and naturally stop by to say hello. Today he seems particularly glad to see me. Uncle Jules has a nice way of making you feel at home. Although he has a big office with an antique desk and a huge portrait of Aunt Emily, and although he is a busy man, he makes you feel as if you and he had come upon this place in your wanderings; he is no more at home than you. He sits everywhere but in his own chair and does business everywhere but at his own desk. Now he takes me into a corner and stands feeling the bones of my shoulder like a surgeon. “Ravaud came in to see me this morning.” Uncle Jules falls silent and throws his head straight back. I know enough to wait. “He said, Jules, I've got a little bad news for you—you know the convention of the open-ends, the one you never miss? I said, sure, I know about it.” Now Uncle Jules puts his head down to my chest as if he were listening to my heart. I wait. “Do you know when it is? Why yes, along about the middle of March, I told him. Along about Tuesday, says Ravaud. Carnival day.” Uncle Jules presses my shoulder to keep me quiet. “Is that right, Ravaud? Oh, that reminds me. Here are your tickets. Have a good trip.” Uncle Jules is bent way over and I can't tell whether he is laughing, but his thumb presses deep into the socket of my shoulder.

“That's pretty good.”

“But then he said something that stuck in my mind. He said, I don't mind going if you want me to, Jules, but you got the man right in your own family. Why that scoun'l beast Jack Bolling knows more about selling open-ends than anybody on Carondelet Street. So. You don't really care about Carnival, do you?” He does not really believe I do not. As for himself, he could not conceive being anywhere on earth Mardi Gras morning but the Boston Club.

“No sir.”

“So. You take the ten-thirty plane Tuesday morning,” says Uncle Jules in his gruff way of conferring favors.

“Where to?”

“Where to! Why goddam, Chicago!”

Chicago. Misery misery son of a bitch of all miseries. Not in a thousand years could I explain it to Uncle Jules, but it is no small thing for me to make a trip, travel hundreds of miles across the country by night to a strange place and come out where there is a different smell in the air and people have a different way of sticking themselves into the world. It is a small thing to him but not to me. It is nothing to him to close his eyes in New Orleans and wake up in San Francisco and think the same thoughts on Telegraph Hill that he thought on Carondelet Street. Me, it is my fortune and misfortune to know how the spirit-presence of a strange place can enrich a man or rob a man but never leave him alone, how, if a man travels lightly to a hundred strange cities and cares nothing for the risk he takes, he may find himself No one and Nowhere. Great day in the morning. What will it mean to go mosying down Michigan Avenue in the neighborhood of five million strangers, each shooting out his own personal ray? How can I deal with five million personal rays?

“I want you to make a few more contacts.” Uncle Jules lays back his head and we wait ten seconds. “Then when you get back, I think we might have something for you downtown.” The gruffest voice and so the greatest favor of all.

“Yes sir,” say I, looking pleased as punch and even prickling in the hairline to do justice to his gruffest favor. Oh sons of all bitches and great beast of Chicago lying in wait. There goes my life in Gentilly, my Little Way, my secret existence among the happy shades in Elysian Fields.

9

FOR SOME TIME NOW
the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.

It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: “In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but—” or “Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However—” and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord. Wednesday as I stood speaking to Eddie Lovell, I felt my eye closing in a broad wink.

After the lunch conference I run into my cousin Nell Lovell on the steps of the library—where I go occasionally to read liberal and conservative periodicals. Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upside-down: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.

Down I plunk myself with a liberal weekly at one of the massive tables, read it from cover to cover, nodding to myself whenever the writer scores a point. Damn right, old son, I say, jerking my chair in approval. Pour it on them. Then up and over to the rack for a conservative monthly and down in a fresh cool chair to join the counter-attack. Oh ho, say I, and hold fast to the chair arm: that one did it: eviscerated! And then out and away into the sunlight, my neck prickling with satisfaction.

Nell Lovell, I was saying, spotted me and over she comes brandishing a book. It seems she has just finished reading a celebrated novel which, I understand, takes a somewhat gloomy and pessimistic view of things. She is angry.

“I don't feel a bit gloomy!” she cries. “Now that Mark and Lance have grown up and flown the coop, I am having the time of my life. I'm taking philosophy courses in the morning and working nights at Le Petit Theatre. Eddie and I have re-examined our values and found them pretty darn enduring. To our utter amazement we discovered that we both have the same life-goal. Do you know what it is?”

“No.”

“To make a contribution, however small, and leave the world just a little better off.”

“That's very good,” I say somewhat uneasily and shift about on the library steps. I can talk to Nell as long as I don't look at her. Looking into her eyes is an embarrassment.

“—we gave the television to the kids and last night we turned on the hi-fi and sat by the fire and read
The Prophet
aloud. I don't find life gloomy!” she cries. “To me, books and people and things are endlessly fascinating. Don't you think so?”

“Yes.” A rumble has commenced in my descending bowel, heralding a tremendous defecation.

Nell goes on talking and there is nothing to do but shift around as best one can, take care not to fart, and watch her in a general sort of way: a forty-year-old woman with a good open American face and another forty years left in her; and eager, above all, eager, with that plaintive lost eagerness American college women get at a certain age. I get to thinking about her and old Eddie re-examining their values. Yes, true. Values. Very good. And then I can't help wondering to myself: why does she talk as if she were dead? Another forty years to go and dead, dead, dead.

“How is Kate?” Nell asks.

I jump and think hard, trying to escape death. “To tell you the truth, I don't know.”

“I am so devoted to her! What a grand person she is.”

“I am too. She is.”

“Come see us, Binx!”

“I will!”

We part laughing and dead.

10

AT FOUR O'CLOCK I
decide it is not too early to set in motion my newest scheme conceived in the interests of money and love, my love for Sharon. Everything depends on a close cooperation between business and love. If ever my business should suffer because of my admiration for Sharon, then my admiration for Sharon would suffer too. Never never will I understand men who throw over everything for some woman. The trick, the joy of it, is to prosper on all fronts, enlist money in the service of love and love in the service of money. As long as I am getting rich, I feel that all is well. It is my Presbyterian blood.