The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [39]
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.
11
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.