The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [36]
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 moseying 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: