The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [41]
“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?