The Moviegoer

Two

THE LAST WEEK-END of Carnival before Mardi Gras; business is very slow. But this morning I awoke with a strong feeling about American Motors. I sell my Ford common and buy American Motors at 26¹/₂.

Again this morning the dream of war, not quite a dream but the simulacrum of a dream, and again there visits the office the queasy-quince smell of 1951 and the Orient. It is not fear but the smell of fear and so it is peevish-pleasant, like a sore tooth which offers itself to the tongue. It attaches itself to everything in the office. An earnings analysis reminds me of it; a lady came in to pick up her A.T.&T. debentures and she smelled of it.

Only my secretary does not smell of it. Her name is Sharon Kincaid and she comes from Eufala, Alabama. Although she has been working for me two weeks, I have not asked her for a date nor spoken of anything other than business. Yet the fact is that for two weeks I have thought of little else. She seems quite indifferent so far; and she is not really beautiful. She is a good-sized girl, at least five feet six and a hundred and thirty-five pounds — as big as a majorette — and her face is a little too short and pert, like one of those Renoir girls, and her eyes a little too yellow. Yet she has the most fearful soap-clean good looks. Her bottom is so beautiful that once as she crossed the room to the cooler I felt my eyes smart with tears of gratitude. She is one of those village beauties of which the South is so prodigal. From the sleaziest house in the sleaziest town, from the loins of redneck pa and rockface ma spring these lovelies, these rosy-cheeked Anglo-Saxon lovelies, by the million. They are commoner than sparrows, and like sparrows they are at home in the streets, in the parks, on doorsteps. No one marvels at them; no one holds them dear. They flush out of their nests first thing and alight in the cities to stay, and no one misses them. Even their men pay no attention to them, anyhow far less attention than they pay to money. But I marvel at them; I miss them; I hold them dear.

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?

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.

Yet it was here in the Tivoli that I first discovered place and time, tasted it like okra. It was during a re-release of Red River a couple of years ago that I became aware of the first faint stirrings of curiosity about the particular seat I sat in, the lady in the ticket booth … As Montgomery Clift was whipping John Wayne in a fist fight, an absurd scene, I made a mark on my seat arm with my thumbnail. Where, I wondered, will this particular piece of wood be twenty years from now, 543 years from now? Once as I was travelling through the Midwest ten years ago I had a layover of three hours in Cincinnati. There was time to go see Joseph Gotten in Holiday at a neighborhood theater called the Altamont — but not before I had struck up an acquaintance with the ticket seller, a lady named Mrs Clara James, and learned that she had seven grandchildren all living in Cincinnati. We still exchange Christmas cards. Mrs James is the only person I know in the entire state of Ohio.

When I get back to my apartment, the first thing I see is a letter from my aunt stuck behind the aluminum seagull on the screen door. I know what it is. It is not a letter actually but a memo. Often when we have had one of our serious talks, she has second thoughts which she is anxious to communicate. Sometimes I get a memo out of a clear sky. She takes a great deal of trouble with me. I wish I were able to please her better.

But before I can read the letter, Mrs Schexnaydre comes down and lends me her copy of Reader’s Digest.

Mrs Schexnaydre is a vigorous pony-size blond who wears sneakers summer and winter. She is very good to me and sees to it that everything is kept spick-and-span. The poor woman is quite lonely; she knows no one except the painters and carpenters and electricians who are forever working on her house. She has lived in New Orleans all her life and knows no one. Sometimes I watch television with her and share a bottle of Jax and talk about her years at MacDonough No. 6 school, the happiest period of her life. It is possible to do this because her television will bring in channel 12 and mine won’t. She watches the quiz programs faithfully and actually feels she knows the contestants. Sometimes I even persuade her to go to the movies with me. Her one fear in life is of Negroes. Although one seldom sees Negroes in this part of Gentilly, our small yard is enclosed by a hurricane fence eight feet high; every window is barred. Over the years she has acquired three dogs, each for the reason that it had been reputed to harbor a special dislike for Negroes. I have no particular objection to this trait in a dog — for all I know, Mrs Schexnaydre’s fears may be quite justified. However, these are miserable curs and to make matters worse, they also dislike me. One I especially despise, an orange-colored brute with a spitz face and a plume of a tail which curves over his back exposing a large convoluted anus. I have come to call him old Rosebud. He is usually content to eye me and raise his lip, but one foggy night he slipped out of an azalea bush and sank his teeth in my leg. Now and then when I know Mrs Schexnaydre is out, I will give him a tremendous kick in the ribs and send him yowling.

“I marked a real cute article for you,” she says briskly and makes a point of leaving immediately to show she is not one of those landladies who intrude upon their tenants.

I am happy to have the magazine. The articles are indeed cute and heart-warming. People who are ordinarily understood to dislike each other or at least to be indifferent toward each other discover that they have much in common. I seem to recall an article about a subway breaking down in New York. The passengers who had their noses buried in newspapers began to talk to each other. They discovered that their fellow passengers were human beings much like themselves and with the same hopes and dreams; people are much the same the world over, even New Yorkers, the article concluded, and given the opportunity will find more to like than to dislike about each other. A lonely old man found himself talking excitedly to a young girl about his hobby of growing irises in a window box, she to him about her hopes and dreams for a career in art. I have to agree with Mrs Schexnaydre: such an episode is indeed heart-warming. On the other hand, it would make me nervous to be present at such a gathering. To tell the truth, if I were a young girl, I would have nothing to do with kindly old philosophers such as are portrayed by Thomas Mitchell in the movies. These birds look fishy to me.

But I can’t read the article now. My aunt’s letter makes a stronger demand upon me. She thinks constantly of other people — she is actually unselfish, the only person I know who is. When she reads something or thinks of something which may be useful to others, she is likely as not to write it down on the spot and mail it to them. Yes, it is a memo. There is no salutation or signature, only a single fat paragraph in a bold backslanted hand.

Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man, to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and a feeling of affection and freedom and justice. These words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus strike me as pretty good advice, for even the orneriest young scamp.

My apartment is as impersonal as a motel room. I have been careful not to accumulate possessions. My library is a single book, Arabia Deserta. The television set looks as if it took coins. On the wall over the bed hang two Currier and Ives prints of ice-skaters in Central Park. How sad the little figures seem, skimming along in step! How sad the city seems!

I switch on television and sit directly in front of it, bolt upright and hands on knees in my ladder-back chair. A play comes on with Dick Powell. He is a cynical financier who is trying to get control of a small town newspaper. But he is baffled by the kindliness and sincerity of the town folk. Even the editor whom he is trying to ruin is nice to him. And even when he swindles the editor and causes him to have a heart attack from which he later dies, the editor is as friendly as ever and takes the occasion to give Powell a sample of his homespun philosophy. “We’re no great shakes as a town,” says the editor on his deathbed, teetering on the very brink of eternity. “But we’re friendly.” In the end Powell is converted by these good folk and instead of trying to control the paper, applies to the editor’s daughter for the job of reporter so he can fight against political corruption.

It is time to pick up Kate.

TONIGHT, THURSDAY NIGHT, I carry out a successful experiment in repetition.

Fourteen years ago, when I was a sophomore, I saw a western at a moviehouse on Freret Street, a place frequented by students and known to them as the Armpit. The movie was The Oxbow Incident and it was quite good. It was about this time of year I saw it, for I remember the smell of privet when I came out and the camphor berries popping underfoot. (All movies smell of a neighborhood and a season: I saw All Quiet on the Western Front, one of my first, in Arcola, Mississippi, in August of 1941, and the noble deeds were done, not merely fittingly but inevitably, in the thick singing darkness of Delta summer and in the fragrance of cottonseed meal.) Yesterday evening I noticed in the Picayune that another western was playing at the same theater. So up I went, by car to my aunt’s house, then up St Charles in a streetcar with Kate so we can walk through the campus.

Nothing had changed. There we sat, I in the same seat I think, and afterwards came out into the smell of privet. Camphor berries popped underfoot on the same section of broken pavement.

A successful repetition.

What is a repetition? A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle. Last week, for example, I experienced an accidental repetition. I picked up a German-language weekly in the library. In it I noticed an advertisement for Nivea Creme, showing a woman with a grainy face turned up to the sun. Then I remembered that twenty years ago I saw the same advertisement in a magazine on my father’s desk, the same woman, the same grainy face, the same Nivea Creme. The events of the intervening twenty years were neutralized, the thirty million deaths, the countless torturings, uprootings and wanderings to and fro. Nothing of consequence could have happened because Nivea Creme was exactly as it was before. There remained only time itself, like a yard of smooth peanut brittle.

How, then, tasted my own fourteen years since The Oxbow Incident?

As usual it eluded me. There was this: a mockery about the old seats, their plywood split, their bottoms slashed, but enduring nevertheless as if they had waited to see what I had done with my fourteen years. There was this also: a secret sense of wonder about the enduring, about all the nights, the rainy summer nights at twelve and one and two o’clock when the seats endured alone in the empty theater. The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.

“Where to now?” asks Kate. She stands at my shoulder under the marquee, plucking at her thumb and peering into the darkness.

“Wherever you like.”

“Go on about your business.”

“Very well.”

She saw Merle Mink this afternoon and seems to feel better for it. He approved her breaking her engagement with Walter and set up a not very rigorous schedule of office visits. Most important, she no longer feels she is coming near the brink of an abyss. “But the trouble is,” she said gloomily as we sat in the theater waiting for the lights to go out, “I am always at my best with doctors. They are charmed with me. I feel fine when I’m sick. It is only when I’m well that—” Now in the shadow of the camphor tree she stops suddenly, takes my arm in both hands. “Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck — people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell’s death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways.”

We wander along the dark paths of the campus and stop off at my weedy stoop behind the laboratory. I sit on the concrete step and think of nothing. Kate presses her bleeding thumb to her mouth. “What is this place?” she asks. A lamp above the path makes a golden sphere among the tree-high shrubs.

“I spent every afternoon for four years in one of those laboratories up there.”

“Is this part of the repetition?”

“No.”

“Part of the search?”

I do not answer. She can only believe I am serious in her own fashion of being serious: as an antic sort of seriousness, which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness. I would as soon not speak to her of such things, since she is bound to understand it as a cultivated eccentricity, like the eccentricity of the roommate she used to talk about: “A curious girl, BoBo. Do you know what she liked to do? Collect iron deer. She located every iron deer in Westchester County and once a month she’d religiously make her rounds and pay them a visit — just park and look at them. She had names for each one: Tertullian, Archibald MacLeish, Alf Landon — she was quite serious about it.” I have no use at all for girls like BoBo nor for such antic doings as collecting iron deer in Westchester County.

“Why don’t you sit down?” I ask her irritably.

“Now the vertical search is when—”

(Am I irritable because, now that she mentions it, I do for a fact sound like BoBo and her goddamn iron deer?)

“If you walk in the front door of the laboratory, you undertake the vertical search. You have a specimen, a cubic centimeter of water or a frog or a pinch of salt or a star.”

“One learns general things?”

“And there is excitement to the search.”

“Why?” she asks.

“Because as you get deeper into the search, you unify. You understand more and more specimens by fewer and fewer formulae. There is the excitement. Of course you are always after the big one, the new key, the secret leverage point, and that is the best of it.”

“And it doesn’t matter where you are or who you are.”

“No.”

“And the danger is of becoming no one nowhere.”

“Never mind.”

Kate parses it out with the keen male bent of her mind and yet with her woman’s despair. Therefore I take care to be no more serious than she.

“On the other hand, if you sit back here and take a little carcass out of the garbage can, a specimen which has been used and discarded, there remains something left over, a clue?”

“Yes, but let’s go.”

“You’re a cold one, dear.”

“As cold as you?”

“Colder. Cold as the grave.” She walks about tearing shreds of flesh from her thumb. I say nothing. It would take very little to set her off on an attack on me, one of her “frank” appraisals. “It is possible, you know, that you are overlooking something, the most obvious thing of all. And you would not know it if you fell over it.”

“What?”

She will not tell me. Instead, in the streetcar, she becomes gay and affectionate toward me. She locks her arms around my waist and gives me a kiss on the mouth and watches me with brown eyes gone to discs.

IT IS TWO O’CLOCK before I get back to Gentilly. Yet sometime before dawn I awake with a violent start and for the rest of the night lie dozing yet wakeful and watchful. I have not slept soundly for many years. Not since the war when I was knocked out for two days have I really lost consciousness as a child loses consciousness in sleep and wakes to a new world not even remembering when he went to bed. I always know where I am and what time it is. Whenever I feel myself sinking toward a deep sleep, something always recalls me: “Not so fast now. Suppose you should go to sleep and it should happen. What then?” What is this that is going to happen? Clearly nothing. Yet there I lie, wakeful and watchful as a sentry, ears tuned to the slightest noise. I can even hear old Rosebud turning round and round in the azalea bushes before settling down.

At dawn I dress and slip out so quietly that the dogs do not stir. I walk toward the lake. It is almost a summer night. Heavy warm air has pushed up from the Gulf, but the earth has memories of winter and lies cold and sopping wet from dew.

It is good to walk in the suburbs at this hour. No one ever uses the sidewalks anyhow and now there are not even children on tricycles and miniature tractors. The concrete is virginal, as grainy as the day it was poured; weeds sprout in the cracks.

The closer you get to the lake, the more expensive the houses are. Already the bungalows and duplexes and tiny ranch houses are behind me. Here are the fifty and sixty thousand dollar homes, fairly big moderns with dagger plants and Australian pines planted in brick boxes, and reproductions of French provincial and Louisiana colonials. The swimming pools steam like sleeping geysers. These houses look handsome in the sunlight; they please me with their pretty colors, their perfect lawns and their clean airy garages. But I have noticed that at this hour of dawn they are forlorn. A sadness settles over them like a fog from the lake.

My father used to suffer from insomnia. One of my few recollections of him is his nighttime prowling. In those days it was thought that sleeping porches were healthful, so my father stuck one onto the house, a screen box with canvas blinds that pulled up from below. Here Scott and I slept on even the coldest nights. My father had trouble sleeping and moved out with us. He tossed like a wounded animal, or slept fitfully, his breath whistling musically through the stiff hairs of his nose — and went back inside before morning, leaving his bed tortured and sour, a smell which I believed to be caused by a nasal ailment known then as “catarrh.” The porch did not work for him and he bought a Saskatchewan sleeping bag from Abercrombie and Fitch and moved out into the rose garden. Just at this hour of dawn I would be awakened by a terrible sound: my father crashing through the screen door, sleeping bag under his arm, his eyes crisscrossed by fatigue and by the sadness of these glimmering dawns. My mother, without meaning to, put a quietus on his hopes of sleep even more effectively than this forlorn hour. She had a way of summing up his doings in a phrase that took the heart out of him. He dreamed, I know, of a place of quiet breathing and a deep sleep under the stars and next to the sweet earth. She agreed. “Honey, I’m all for it. I think we all ought to get back to nature and I’d be right with you, Honey, if it wasn’t for the chiggers. I’m chigger bait.” She made him out to be another Edgar Kennedy (who was making shorts then) thrashing around in the bushes with his newfangled camping equipment. To her it was better to make a joke of it than be defeated by these chilly dawns. But after that nothing more was said about getting back to nature.

He made a mistake. He was trying to sleep. He thought he had to sleep a certain number of hours every night, breathe fresh air, eat a certain number of calories, evacuate his bowels regularly and have a stimulating hobby (it was the nineteen thirties and everybody believed in science and talked about “ductless glands”). I do not try to sleep. And I could not tell you the last time my bowels moved; sometimes they do not move for a week but I have no interest in such matters. As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquillized in their despair. I muse along as quietly as a ghost. Instead of trying to sleep I try to fathom the mystery of this suburb at dawn. Why do these splendid houses look so defeated at this hour of the day? Other houses, say a ’dobe house in New Mexico or an old frame house in Feliciana, look much the same day or night. But these new houses look haunted. Even the churches out here look haunted. What spirit takes possession of them? My poor father. I can see him, blundering through the patio furniture, the Junior Jets and the Lone Ranger pup tents, dragging his Saskatchewan sleeping bag like the corpse of his dead hope.

When I return, the sun is warm on my back. I stretch out in a snug little cul de sac between the garage and the house, under the insolent eye of Rosebud, and doze till nine o’clock when the market opens.

AWAKENED BY ROSEBUD’S growling. It is the postman. Rosebud feels my eye on him, cocks an eyebrow around to see me and is discomfited to meet my eye; he looks away, pretends to settle his mouth, but his lip is dry and snags high on a tooth. Now he is actively embarrassed.

School children across the street line up in ragged platoons before the storklike nuns, the girls in little blue bell-shaped skirts and suspenders, the boys a bit dreary in their khaki. In they march, under the schematic dove. The morning sunlight winks on the polished metal of ocean wave and the jungle gym. How shiny and strong and well-set are the steel pipes, polished to silver by thousands of little blue-skirted and khaki-clad butts.

The postman has a letter from Harold Graebner in Chicago. It is a note and a birth announcement. Harold asks me to be godfather to his new baby. The enclosed card announces the birth in the following way:

1 C.O.D. PACKAGE

SHIPPING WEIGHT: 7 LB. 4 oz.

HANDLE WITH TENDER LOVING CARE, ETC.

Harold Graebner probably saved my life in the Orient and for this reason he loves me. When I get a letter, it is almost certain to be from Harold Graebner. I no longer write or receive letters, except Harold’s. When I was in the army I wrote long, sensitive and articulate letters to my aunt, giving my impressions of countries and peoples. I wrote such things as

Japan is lovely this time of year. How strange to think of going into combat! Not so much fear — since my chances are very good — as wonder, wonder that everything should be so full of expectancy, every tick of the watch, every rhododendron blossom. Tolstoy and St Exupery were right about war, etc.

A regular young Rupert Brooke was I, “—full of expectancy.” Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it. That’s what killed my father, English romanticism, that and 1930 science. A line for my notebook:

Explore connection between romanticism and scientific objectivity. Does a scientifically minded person become a romantic because he is a left-over from his own science?

I must reply to Harold, but it is almost more than I can do to write two sentences in a row. The words are without grace.

Dear Harold: Thank you for asking me to be godfather to your baby. Since, however, I am not a practical Catholic, I doubt if I could. But I certainly appreciate—

Certainly appreciate. Tear it up.

AN ODD THING. Ever since Wednesday I have become acutely aware of Jews. There is a clue here, but of what I cannot say. How do I know? Because whenever I approach a Jew, the Geiger counter in my head starts rattling away like a machine gun; and as I go past with the utmost circumspection and with every sense alert — the Geiger counter subsides.

There is nothing new in my Jewish vibrations. During the years when I had friends my Aunt Edna, who is a theosophist, noticed that all my friends were Jews. She knew why moreover: I had been a Jew in a previous incarnation. Perhaps that is it. Anyhow it is true that I am Jewish by instinct. We share the same exile. The fact is, however, I am more Jewish than the Jews I know. They are more at home than I am. I accept my exile.

Another evidence of my Jewishness: the other day a sociologist reported that a significantly large percentage of solitary moviegoers are Jews.

Jews are my first real clue.

When a man is in despair and does not in his heart of hearts allow that a search is possible and when such a man passes a Jew in the street, he notices nothing.

When a man becomes a scientist or an artist, he is open to a different kind of despair. When such a man passes a Jew in the street, he may notice something but it is not a remarkable encounter. To him the Jew can only appear as a scientist or artist like himself or as a specimen to be studied.

But when a man awakes to the possibility of a search and when such a man passes a Jew in the street for the first time, he is like Robinson Crusoe seeing the footprint on the beach.

A BEAUTIFUL FRIDAY morning and a successful excursion into St Bernard Parish with Sharon.

Sharon eyes my MG narrowly. After she has gotten in, she makes it plain that MG or no MG there is to be no monkey business. How does she make such a thing plain and in an MG sitting thigh to thigh and knee to knee? By her Southern female trick of politeness. “This is the cutest little car!” she sings and goes trailing off in a fit of absent-mindedness, hands to the nape of her neck and tilting her head forward so that she surveys the street though her eyebrows and with a cold woman’s eye; then seeming to rouse herself apologetically: “This sure beats typing. Mhm-M!”—as singsongy and shut off to herself as her mammy in Eufala. Southern girls learn a lot from their nurses.

We meet Mr Sartalamaccia and a queer thing happens.

First, some kind of reversal takes place and it becomes natural for Mr Sartalamaccia to show me the place he wants to buy. He becomes the guide to my property and even points out the good features. A far cry from a duck club now, my patrimony is hemmed in on one side by a housing development and on the other by a police pistol range. In fact, my estate puts me in mind of the pictures in detective magazines of the scene where a crime was committed: a bushy back lot it is, tunnelled through by hog trails and a suspicious car track or two. Every inch of open ground sprouts new green shoots and from the black earth there seems to arise a green darkness. It is already like summer here. Cicadas drone in the weeds and the day seems long.

We leave the MG in a glade (a good hard-used creature of red metal and fragrant worn leather; I run a hand over its flank of stout British steel as if it were a mare) and stand on a hummock with Mr Sartalamaccia between us; Mr Sartalamaccia: wagging a limp panama behind him and giving off a bitter cotton smell. He is less an Italian than a Southern country man, haggard and clean as an Alabama farmer come to church.

“The lodge was here, Roaring Camp they called it,” I tell Sharon. She stands blinking and inviolate, a little rared back and entrenched within herself. Not for her the thronging spirit-presence of the place and the green darkness of summer come back again and the sadness of it. She went to Eufala High School and it is all the same to her where she is (so she might have stood in the Rotunda during her school trip to Washington) and she is right, for she is herself sweet life and where is the sadness of that? “I came here once with my father and great uncle. They wouldn’t have beds, so we slept on the floor. I slept between them and I had a new Ingersoll watch and when I went to bed, I took it out and put it on the floor beside my head. During the night my uncle rolled over on it and broke it. It became a famous story and somehow funny, the way he rolled over on my watch, and they would all laugh — haw haw haw — like a bunch of Germans. Then at Christmas he gave me another watch which turned out to be a gold Hamilton.” Sharon stands astraddle, as heavy of leg as a Wac. “I remember when my father built the lodge. Before that he had read the works of Fabre and he got the idea of taking up a fascinating scientific hobby. He bought a telescope and one night he called us outside and showed us the horsehead nebula in Orion. That was the end of the telescope. After that he began to read Browning and saw himself in need of a world of men. That was when he started the duck club.”

“Grow old along with me.

The best is yet to be,” says Sharon.

“That’s right.”

Mr Sartalamaccia has become restless; he works his hat behind him. His fingernails are large and almost filled with white moons. “Your father didn’t build it. Judge Anse was the one that built it.”

“Is that right? You knew them? I didn’t know you—”

Mr Sartalamaccia tells it forlornly, without looking up — knowing no more than the facts pure and simple and hardly believing that we don’t know. Everybody knows. “I built it for him.”

“How did you know him?”

“I didn’t. One morning before Christmas I was just about finished with my store over there and Judge Anse come in and started talking to me. He said — uh—” Mr Sartalamaccia smiles a secret little smile and his head sinks even lower as he makes bold to recall the very words. “—what’s your name? Yes: what’s your name? I told him. He said — uh: you built this store? I said, yessir. We talked. So he looked at me and he said — uh: I’m going tell you what I want you to do. He writes this check. He said — uh: Here’s a check for a thousand dollars. I want you to build me a lodge and come on, I’ll show you where. So I said, all right. So he said — uh—” Mr Sartalamaccia waits until the words, the very words, speak themselves—”Let’s go, Vince, like him and me, we were going to have us a big time. He never saw me before in his life and he walks in my store and writes me a check on the Canal Bank for a thousand dollars. And he didn’t come back for six weeks.”

“Did he like the lodge?”

“I mean he liked it.”

“I see.” I see. There was such a time and there were such men (and Mr Sartalamaccia smiles to remember it), men who could say to other men, here do this, and have it done and done with pleasure and remembered with pleasure. “Have you always been here?”

“Me?” Mr Sartalamaccia looks up for the first time. “I had only been here three weeks! Since November.”

“Where are you from?”

“I was raised in Ensley, near Birmingham, but in nineteen thirty-two times was so hard I started moving around. I visited forty-six states, all but Washington and Oregon, just looking around and I never went hungry. In nineteen thirty four I come to stay with my brother in Violet and started trapping.”

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!”

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.

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.

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.

At four fifteen I sit on the edge of her desk, fold my arms and look troubled.

“Miss Kincaid. I have a favor to ask of you.”

“Yes sir, Mr Bolling.”

As she looks up at me, I think how little we know each other. She is really a stranger. Her yellow eyes are quite friendly and opaque. She is very nice and very anxious to be helpful. My heart sinks. Love, the very possibility of love, vanishes. Our sexes vanish. We are a regular little team.

“Do you know what these names are?”

“Customers’ files.”

“They are also portfolios, individual listings of stocks and bonds and so forth. Now I tell you what we do every year about this time. In a few weeks income taxes must be filed. Now we usually mail our customers a lot of booklets and charts and whatnot to help them with their returns. This year we’re going to do something different. I’m going to go through each portfolio myself, give the tax status of each transaction and make specific recommendations to every customer in a personal letter, recommendations about capital gains, and losses, stock rights and warrants, dates of involuntary conversions, stock dividends and so on. You’d be amazed how many otherwise shrewd businessmen will take long term gains and losses the same year.”

She listens closely, her yellow eyes snapping with intelligence.

“Now I’m already familiar with the accounts, so that’s no problem. But it’s going to mean a lot of letters. And we don’t have much time.” Why I must have been crazy; this girl is a good little sister.

“When would we start?”

“Can you work an hour later this afternoon and Saturday morning?”

“I’d like to make a phone call,” she says in the brusque-kindly manner of country folk who grant favors with an angry willingness.

A moment later she is standing at my desk stroking the beige plastic with two scarlet nails.

“Is it all right for someone to pick me up at five for a few minutes?”

Someone. How ancient is her wisdom. I am nothing to her, yet by the surest of instincts she labels her date a neuter person. She knows I do not believe there is such a person. But she knows what she does. Despite myself I believe a someone will pick her up, a shadowy and inconsequential person of neuter gender.

“I hope I’m not interfering with anything too serious.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Why no.”

She surprises me. I said “serious” ambiguously and perhaps purposely so. But she is quick to give it its courtship meaning.

Here is an unexpected advantage. It could be useful to me to see what sort of fellow her friend is. But I needn’t worry about managing a glimpse of him. A few minutes before five he walks right into the office. He is much to my liking — I could throw my arms around him. A sharp character — no youth as I feared — a Faubourg Marigny type, Mediterranean, big-nosed, lumpy-jawed, a single stitched-in wrinkle over his eyebrows from just above which there springs up a great pompadour of wiry bronze hair. His face aches with it. He has no use for me at all. I nod at him with the warmest feelings, and he appears to nod at me but keeps on nodding, nods past me and at the office as if he were appraising it. Now and then his lip draws back along his teeth admitting a suck of air as sharp as a steam blast. As he waits for Sharon, he swings his fist into an open hand and snaps his knee back and forth inside his wide pants.

The Faubourg Marigny fellow leaves at last and we work steadily until seven. I dictate some very sincere letters. Dear Mr Hebert: I happened to be looking over your portfolio this morning and it occurred to me that you might realize a substantial tax saving by unloading your holding of Studebaker-Packard. Naturally I am not acquainted with your overall tax picture, but if you do have a problem taxwise, I suggest taking a capital loss for the following reasons …

It is good to have both Mr Hebert and Sharon on my mind. To be thinking of only one of them would make me nervous.

We work hard and as comrades, swept along by a partnership so strong that the smallest overture of love would be brushed aside by either of us as foolishness. Peyton Place would embarrass both of us now.

By six o’clock I become aware that it is time to modulate the key ever so slightly. From now on everything I do must exhibit a certain value in her eyes, a value, moreover, which she must begin to recognize.

Thus we send out for sandwiches and drink coffee as we work. Already the silences between us have changed in character, become easier. It is possible to stand at the window, loosen my collar and rub the back of my neck like Dana Andrews. And to become irritable with her: “No no no no, Kincaid, that’s not what I meant to say. Take five.” I go to the cooler, take two aspirins, crumple the paper cup. Her friend, old “someone,” turns out to be invaluable. In my every tactic he is the known quantity. He is my triangulation point. I am all business to his monkey business.

Already she has rolled a fresh sheet into the platen. “Try it again,” and she looks at me ironically and with lights in her eyes.

I stretch out both hands to her desk, put my head down between my arms.

“All right. Take it this way …” O Rory Rory Rory.

She is getting it. She is alert: there is something afoot. Now when she looks up between sentences, it is through her eyebrows and with her head cocked and still, still as a little partridge.

She watches closely now, her yellow agate-eyes snapping with interest. We are, all at once, on our way. We are like two children lost in a summer afternoon who, hardly aware of each other, find a door in a wall and enter an enchanted garden. Now we might join hands. She is watchful to see whether I see this too.

But this is no time to take chances. Although Baron Ochs’ waltz sings in my ears and although I could grab her up out of her chair and kiss her smack on the mouth — we go back to work.

“Dear Mr Fontenot: Glancing over your portfolio, it struck me that you are not in the best position to take advantage of the dawning age of missiles …”

The Faubourg Marigny fellow does not return and at seven thirty it seems natural for me to drive Sharon home.

A line of squalls is due from Texas and we drive down to Esplanade in a flicker of summer lightning. The air presses heavily over Elysian Fields; earlier in the evening lake swallows took alarm and went veering away to the swamps. The Quarter is teeming. It is good to put behind us the green fields and the wide sky of Gentilly and to come into a narrow place pressed in upon by decrepit buildings and filled by man-smells and man-sounds. No thrush flutings and swallow cries in here. At twilight it is good to come away from the open sky and into a yellow-lit place and sit next to a warm thigh. I almost violate my resolution and ask Sharon if she will have a drink. But I don’t. Instead I watch her up into her house. She ascends a new flight of concrete steps which soars like a gangplank into a dim upper region.

TONIGHT IS KATE’S supper with the queens and I shall not see her. I drink beer and watch television, but every minute or so thoughts of Sharon, my big beautiful majorette from Alabama, come crowding into my head and my hands begin to sweat. The air is heavy and still. It is a time to be on guard. At such times there is the temptation to behave without prudence, to try to see Sharon tonight, or even park on Esplanade and spy on her and run the risk of ruining everything. Then at last the storm breaks, a real Texas rattler. Gradually the malaise lets up and it becomes possible to sit without perturbation and at heart’s ease, hands on knees in my ladder-back chair and watch television.

The marshal traps some men in an Indian hogan. The squaw has been killed, leaving a baby. In an unexpected turn of events the killers get the upper hand and hold the marshal in a line shack as a hostage. The marshal reminds them of the baby in the hogan. This is no ordinary marshal. He is also a humanist. “It ain’t nothing but a stinking Indian,” says one of the killers. “You’re wrong,” says the marshal. “It is a human being.” In the end he prevails upon the killers to spare the baby and even to have it baptized. The killers go out in a gruff manner and fetch the padre, a fellow who looks as much like the late H. B. Warner as it is possible for a man to look.

I go to bed cozy and dry in the storm, snug as a larva in a cocoon, wrapped safe and warm in loving Christian kindness. From chair to bed and from TV to radio for one little nightcap of a program. Being a creature of habit, as regular as a monk, and taking pleasure in the homeliest repetitions, I listen every night at ten to a program called This I Believe. Monks have their compline, I have This I Believe. On the program hundreds of the highest-minded people in our country, thoughtful and intelligent people, people with mature inquiring minds, state their personal credos. The two or three hundred I have heard so far were without exception admirable people. I doubt if any other country or any other time in history has produced such thoughtful and high-minded people, especially the women. And especially the South. I do believe the South has produced more high-minded women, women of universal sentiments, than any other section of the country except possibly New England in the last century. Of my six living aunts, five are women of the loftiest theosophical panBrahman sentiments. The sixth is still a Presbyterian.

If I had to name a single trait that all these people shared, it is their niceness. Their lives are triumphs of niceness. They like everyone with the warmest and most generous feelings. And as for themselves: it would be impossible for even a dour person not to like them.

Tonight’s subject is a playwright who transmits this very quality of niceness in his plays. He begins:

I believe in people. I believe in tolerance and understanding between people. I believe in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual—

Everyone on This I Believe believes in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual. I have noticed, however, that the believers are far from unique themselves, are in fact alike as peas in a pod.

I believe in music. I believe in a child’s smile. I believe in love. I also believe in hate.

This is true. I have known a couple of these believers, humanists and lady psychologists who come to my aunt’s house. On This I Believe they like everyone. But when it comes down to this or that particular person, I have noticed that they usually hate his guts.

I did not always enjoy This I Believe. While I was living at my aunt’s house, I was overtaken by a fit of perversity. But instead of writing a letter to an editor, as was my custom, I recorded a tape which I submitted to Mr Edward R. Murrow. “Here are the beliefs of John Bickerson Bolling, a moviegoer living in New Orleans,” it began, and ended, “I believe in a good kick in the ass. This — I believe.” I soon regretted it, however, as what my grandfather would have called “a smart-alecky stunt” and I was relieved when the tape was returned. I have listened faithfully to This I Believe ever since.

I believe in freedom, the sacredness of the individual and the brotherhood of man—

concludes the playwright.

I believe in believing. This — I believe.

All my shakiness over Sharon is gone. I switch off my radio and lie in bed with a pleasant tingling sensation in the groin, a tingling for Sharon and for all my fellow Americans.

SOMETIME DURING THE night and at the height of the storm the telephone rings, a dreadful summons, and I find myself in the middle of the floor shaking like a leaf and wondering what is amiss. It is my aunt.

“What’s that?” The telephone crackles with static. I listen so hard I can’t hear.

My aunt tells me that something has happened to Kate. When Uncle Jules and Walter arrived at the hotel from the Iberia ball, Kate was not to be found. Nell Lovell, herself a former queen, told them that Kate had left abruptly sometime before eleven o’clock. That was three hours ago and she had not come home. But Nell wasn’t worried. “You know as well as I do what she’s doing, Cousin Em,” she told my aunt. “You remember my Christmas party at Empire when she took out up the levee and walked all the way to Laplace? That Kate.” But my aunt has her doubts. “Listen to this,” she says in a peculiar voice — it is the dry litigious way of speaking of closely knit families in times of trouble: one would imagine she was speaking of a stranger. “Here is the last entry in her diary: Tonight will tell the story — will the new freedom work — if not, no more tight ropes for me, thank you. Now you recall her tight rope.”

“Yes.” “Tight rope” is an expression Kate used when she was sick the first time. When she was a child and her mother was alive, she said, it used to seem to her that people laughed and talked in an easy and familiar way and stood on solid ground, but now it seemed that they (not just she but everybody) had become aware of the abyss that yawned at their feet even on the most ordinary occasions — especially on the most ordinary occasions. Thus, she would a thousand times rather find herself in the middle of no man’s land than at a family party or luncheon club.

“Now I’m not really worried about her,” my aunt declares briskly. There is a silence and the wire crackles. Strange to say, my main emotion is a slight social embarrassment. I cast about for something to say. “After all the girl is twenty-five years old,” says my aunt.

“That’s true.”

Lightning strikes somewhere close, a vicious bolt. The clap comes hard upon it, in the very whitening, and shakes the house.

“—finally reached him in his hotel room in Atlanta.”

“Who?”

“Sam. He’s flying down first thing in the morning, instead of Sunday. He was quite excited.”

“About what?”

“He said he had the most extraordinary piece of news. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. It seems that by the eeriest sort of coincidence two things happened this very day with a direct bearing on Kate. Anyhow.”

“Yes ma’am?”

“I have a hunch she’ll wander out your way. If she does, will you drive her home?”

“Yes.”

“It isn’t as if Kate were another Otey Ann,” says my aunt after a moment.

“No, it isn’t.” She is thinking of two things: one, an acquaintance from Feliciana named Otey Ann Aldridge who went crazy and used to break out of the state hospital in Jackson and come to New Orleans and solicit strangers on Bourbon Street; two, she is thinking of the look in Nell Lovell’s eye, the little risible gleam, even as she reassured my aunt.

I awake with a start at three o’clock, put on a raincoat and go outside for a breath of air.

The squall line has passed over. Elysian Fields is dripping and still, but there is a commotion of winds high in the air where the cool heavy front has shouldered up the last of the fretful ocean air. The wind veers around to the north and blows away the storm until the moon swims high, moored like a kite and darting against the fleeing shreds and ragtags of cloud.

I sit in the shelter outside Mrs Schexnaydre’s chain link fence. Opposite the school, it is used by those children who catch buses toward the lake. The streetlight casts a blueblack shadow. Across the boulevard, at the catercorner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants, is a vacant lot chest high in last summer’s weeds. Some weeks ago the idea came to me of buying the lot and building a service station. It is for sale, I learned, for twenty thousand dollars. What with the windfall from Mr Sartalamaccia, it becomes possible to think seriously of the notion. It is easy to visualize the little tile cube of a building with its far flung porches, its apron of silky concrete and, revolving on high, the immaculate bivalve glowing in every inch of its pretty styrene (I have already approached the Shell distributor).

A taxi pulls up under the streetlight. Kate gets out and strides past the shelter, hands thrust deep in her pockets. Her eyes are pools of darkness. There is about her face the rapt almost ugly look of solitary people. When I call out to her, she comes directly over with a lack of surprise, with a dizzy dutiful obedience, which is disquieting. Then I see that she is full of it, one of her great ideas, the sort that occur to people on long walks.

“What a fool I’ve been!” She lays both hands on my arm and takes no notice of the smell of the hour. She is nowhere; she is in the realm of her idea. “Do you think it is possible for a person to make a single mistake — not do something wrong, you understand, but make a miscalculation — and ruin his life?”

“Why not?”

“I mean after all. Couldn’t a person be miserable because he got one thing wrong and never learned otherwise — because the thing he got wrong was of such a nature that he could not be told because the telling itself got it wrong — just as if you had landed on Mars and therefore had no way of knowing that a Martian is mortally offended by a question and so every time you asked what was wrong, it only grew worse for you?” Catching sight of my sleeve, she seizes it with a curious rough gesture, like a housewife fingering goods. “My stars, pajamas,” she says offhandedly. “Well?” She searches my face in the violet shadow.

“I don’t know.”

“But I do know! I found out, Binx. None of you could have told me even if you wanted to. I don’t even know if you know.”

I wait gloomily. Long ago I learned to be wary of Kate’s revelations. These exalted moments, when she is absolutely certain what course to take for the rest of her life, are often followed by spells of the blackest depression. “No, I swear I don’t believe you do,” says Kate, peering into my face, into one eye and then the other, like a lover. “And my telling you would do no good.”

“Tell me anyhow.”

“I am free. After twenty-five years I am free.”

“How do you know?”

“You’re not surprised?”

“When did you find out?”

“At four thirty this afternoon, yesterday afternoon.”

“At Merle’s?”

“Yes. I was looking up at his bookshelf and I hadn’t said anything for a long time. I saw his book, a book with a sort of burlap cover that always struck me unpleasantly. Yet how hard I had tried to live up to him and his book, live joyfully and as oneself etcetera. There were days when I would come in as nervous as an actress and there were moments When I succeeded — in being myself and brilliantly (look at me, Merle, I’m doing it!), so brilliantly that I think he loved me. Poor Merle. You see, there is nothing he can say. He can’t tell me the secret even if he knew it. Do you know what I did? After a minute or so he asked me: what comes to mind? I sat up and rubbed my eyes and then it dawned on me. But I couldn’t believe it. It was too simple. My God, can a person live twenty-five years, a life of crucifixion, through a misunderstanding? Yes! I stood up. I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free. But even if Merle knew this and told me, there is no way in the world I could have taken his advice. How strange to think that you cannot pass along the discovery. So again Merle said: what comes to mind? I got up and told him good-by. He said, it’s only four thirty; the hour is not yet over. Then he understood I was leaving. He got interested and suggested we look into the reasons. I said, Merle, how I wish you were right. How good to think that there are reasons and that if I am silent, it means I am hiding something. How happy I would be to be hiding something. And how proud I am when I do find secret reasons for you, your own favorite reasons. But what if there is nothing? That is what I’ve been afraid of until now — being found out to be concealing nothing at all. But now I know why I was afraid and why I needn’t be. I was afraid because I felt that I must be such and such a person, even as good a person as your joyous and creative person (I read your articles, Merle). What a discovery! One minute I am straining every nerve to be the sort of person I was expected to be and shaking in my boots for fear I would fail — and the next minute to know with the calmest certitude that even if I could succeed and become your joyous and creative person, that it was not good enough for me and that I had something better. I was free. Now I am saying good-by, Merle. And I walked out, as free as a bird for the first time in my life, twenty-five years old, healthy as a horse, rich as cream, and with the world before me. Ah, don’t disapprove, Binx. Binx, Binx. You think I should go back! Oh I will, no doubt. But I know I am right or I would not feel so wonderful.”

She will not feel wonderful long. Already the sky over the Chef is fading and soon the dawn will glimmer about us like the bottom of the sea. I know very well that when the night falls away into gray distances, she will sink into herself. Even now she is overtaking herself: already she is laboring ever so slightly at her exaltation.

I take her cold hands. “What do you think of this for an idea?” I tell her about the service station and Mr Sartalamaccia. “We could stay on here at Mrs Schexnaydre’s. It is very comfortable. I may even run the station myself. You could come sit with me at night, if you liked. Did you know you can net over fifteen thousand a year on a good station?”

“You sweet old Binx! Are you asking me to marry you?”

“Sure.” I watch her uneasily.

“Not a bad life, you say. It would be the best of all possible lives.” She speaks in a rapture — something like my aunt. My heart sinks. It is too late. She has already overtaken herself.

“Don’t — worry about it.”

“I won’t! I won’t!”—as enraptured and extinguished in her soul, gone, as a character played by Eva Marie Saint. Leaning over, she hugs herself.

“What’s the matter?”

“Ooooh,” Kate groans, Kate herself now. “I’m so afraid.”

“I know.”

“What am I going to do?”

“You mean right now?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll go to my car. Then well drive down to the French Market and get some coffee. Then well go home.”

“Is everything going to be all right?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me. Say it.”

“Everything is going to be all right.”