The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [46]
The car itself is all-important, I have discovered. When I first moved to Gentilly, I bought a new Dodge sedan, a Red Ram Six. It was a comfortable, conservative and economical two-door sedan, just the tiling, it seemed to me, for a young Gentilly businessman. When I first slid under the wheel to drive it, it seemed that everything was in order—here was I, a healthy young man, a veteran with all his papers in order, a U.S. citizen driving a very good car. All these things were true enough, yet on my first trip to the Gulf Coast with Marcia, I discovered to my dismay that my fine new Dodge was a regular incubator of malaise. Though it was comfortable enough, though it ran like a clock, though we went spinning along in perfect comfort and with a perfect view of the scenery like the American couple in the Dodge ad, the malaise quickly became suffocating. We sat frozen in a gelid amiability. Our cheeks ached from smiling. Either would have died for the other. In despair I put my hand under her dress, but even such a homely little gesture as that was received with the same fearful politeness. I longed to stop the car and bang my head against the curb. We were free, moreover, to do that or anything else, but instead on we rushed, a little vortex of despair moving through the world like the still eye of a hurricane. As it turned out, I should have stopped and banged my head, for Marcia and I returned to New Orleans defeated by the malaise. It was weeks before we ventured out again.
This is the reason I have no use for cars and prefer buses and streetcars. If I were a Christian I would make a pilgrimage by foot, for this is the best way to travel. But girls do not like it. My little red MG, however, is an exception to the rule. It is a miserable vehicle actually, with not a single virtue save one: it is immune to the malaise. You have no idea what happiness Marcia and I experienced as soon as we found ourselves spinning along the highway in this bright little beetle. We looked at each other in astonishment: the malaise was gone! We sat out in the world, out in the thick summer air between sky and earth. The noise was deafening, the wind was like a hurricane; straight ahead the grains of the concrete rushed at us like mountains.
It was nevertheless with some apprehension that I set out with Sharon. What if the malaise had been abated simply by the novelty of the MG? For by now the MG was no novelty. What if the malaise was different with every girl and needed a different cure? One thing was certain. Here was the acid test. For the stakes were very high. Either very great happiness lay in store for us, or malaise past all conceiving. Marcia and Linda were as nothing to this elfin creature, this sumptuous elf from Eufala who moved like a ballerina, hard-working and docile, dreaming in her work, head to the side, cheek downy and spare as a boy’s. With her in the bucket seat beside me I spin along the precipice with the blackest malaise below and the greenest of valleys ahead. One great advantage is mine: her boy friend, the Faubourg Marigny character. The fellow has no better sense than to make demands on her and she has no use for him. Thank God for the macaroni.
Indeed as we pass through the burning swamps of Chef Menteur, it seems to me that I catch a whiff of the malaise. A little tongue of hellfire licks at our heels and the MG jumps ahead, roaring like a bomber through the sandy pine barrens and across Bay St. Louis. Sharon sits smiling and silent, her eyes all but closed against the wind, her big golden knees doubled up against the dashboard. “I swear, this is the cutest little car I ever saw!” she yelled at me a minute ago.
By some schedule of proprieties known to her, she did not become my date until she left her rooming house where she put on a boy