The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [70]
Margot becomes very friendly, in the gossipy style of the Mississippi Delta.
“So you forgot about it being Mardi Gras and couldn’t get a plane.”
“No, we like the train.”
Sidney is excited, not by the trip as I am, but by the convention. Leaning across the aisle with a program rolled up in his hand, he explains that he is scheduled for a panel on tax relief for bond funds. “What about you?”
“I think I am taking part in something called a Cracker Barrel Session.”
“You’ll like it. Everybody talks right off the top of their head. You can take your coat off, get up and stretch. Anything. Last year we had this comical character from Georgia.” Sidney casts about for some way of conveying just how comical and failing, passes on without minding. “What a character. Extremely comical. What’s the topic?”
“Competing with the variable endowments.”
“Oh yass,” says Sidney with a wry look of our trade. “I don’t worry about it.” He slides the cylinder of paper to and fro. “Do you?”
“No.”
Sidney suggests a bridge game, but Kate begs off. The Grosses move to a table in the corner and start playing gin rummy.
Kate, who has been fumbling in her purse, becomes still. I feel her eyes on my face.
“Do you have my capsules?”
“What?”
“My capsules.”
“Why yes, I do. I forgot that I had them.”
Not taking her eyes from my face, she receives the bottle, puts it in her purse, snaps it.
“That’s not like you.”
“I didn’t take them.”
“Who did?”
“Sam gave them to me. It was while I was in the hammock. I hardly remember it.”
“He took them from my purse?”
“I don’t know.”
For a long moment she sits, hands in her lap, fingers curling up and stirring a little. Then abruptly she rises and leaves. When she returns, her face is scrubbed and pale, the moisture still dark at the roots of her hair. What has upset her is not the incident of the capsules but meeting the Grosses. It spoils everything, this prospect of making pleasant talk, of having a delightful time, as Sidney would put it (“There we were moping over missing the plane, when Jack Bolling shows up and we have ourselves a ball”)—when we might have gone rocking up through dark old Mississippi alone together in the midst of strangers. Still she is better. Perhaps it is her reviving hope of losing the Grosses to gin rummy or perhaps it is the first secret promise of the chemicals entering her blood.
Now, picking up speed, we gain the swamp. Kate and I sway against each other and watch the headlights of the cars on the swamp road, winking through the moss like big yellow lightning bugs.
The drowsiness returns. It is unwelcome. I recognize it as the sort of fitful twilight which has come over me of late, a twilight where waking dreams are dreamed and sleep never comes.
The man next to me is getting off in St. Louis. When the conductor comes to collect our tickets, he surrenders a stub: he is going home. His suit is good. He sits with his legs crossed, one well-clad haunch riding up like a ham, his top leg held out at an obtuse angle by the muscle of his calf. His brown hair is youthful (he himself is thirty-eight or forty) and makes a cowlick in front. With the cowlick and the black eyeglasses he looks quite a bit like the actor Gary Merrill and has the same certified permission to occupy pleasant space with his pleasant self. In ruddy good health, he muffles a hearty belch in a handkerchief. This very evening, no doubt, he has had an excellent meal at Galatoire’s, and the blood of his portal vein bears away a golden harvest of nutrient globules. When he first goes through his paper, he opens it like a book and I have no choice but to read the left page with him. We pause at an advertisement of a Bourbon Street nightclub which is a picture of a dancer with an oiled body. Her triceps arch forward like a mare’s. For a second we gaze heavy-lidded and pass on. Now he finds what he wants and folds his paper once, twice and again, into a neat packet exactly two columns wide, like a subway rider in New York. Propping it against his knee, he takes out a slender gold pencil, makes a deft one-handed