The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [71]
In order to deepen and enrich the marital—
It is a counseling column which I too read faithfully.
The train sways through the swamp. The St. Louisan, breathing powerfully through the stiff hairs of his nose, succeeds in sitting in such a manner, tilted over on his right hip and propped against himself, that his thigh forms a secure writing platform for the packet.
The voices in the car become fretful. It begins to seem that the passengers have ridden together for a long time and have developed secret understandings and old grudges. They speak crossly and elliptically to each other.
Staying awake is a kind of sickness and sleep is forever guarded against by a dizzy dutiful alertness. Waking wide-eyed dreams come as fitfully as swampfire.
Dr. and Mrs. Bob Dean autograph copies of their book Technique in Marriage in a Canal Street department store. A pair of beauties. I must have come in all the way from Gentilly, for I stand jammed against a table which supports a pyramid of books. I cannot take my eyes from the Deans: an oldish couple but still handsome and both, rather strangely, heavily freckled. As they wait for the starting time, they are jolly with each other and swap banter in the professional style of show people (I believe these preliminaries are called the warm-up). “No, we never argue,” says Bob Dean. “Because whenever an argument starts, we consult the chapter I wrote on arguments,” “No, dear,” says Jackie Dean. “It was I who wrote the chapter—” etc. Everyone laughs. I notice that nearly all the crowd jamming against me are women, firm middle-aged one-fifty pounders. Under drooping lids I watch the Deans, peculiarly affected by their routine which is staged so effortlessly that during the exchange of quips, they are free to cast business-like looks about them as if no one were present. But when they get down to business, they become as sober as Doukhobors and effuse an air of dedicated almost evangelical helpfulness. A copy of the book lies open on the table. I read: “Now with a tender regard for your partner remove your hand from the nipple and gently manipulate—” It is impossible not to imagine them at their researches, as solemn as a pair of brontosauruses, their heavy old freckled limbs about each other, hands probing skillfully for sensitive zones, pigmented areolas, out-of-the-way mucous glands, dormant vascular nexuses. A wave of prickling passes over me such as I have never experienced before.
My head, nodding like a daffodil, falls a good three inches toward the St. Louisan before it jerks itself up. Kate sits shivering against me, but the St. Louisan is as warm and solid as roast beef. As the train rocks along on its unique voyage through space-time, thousands of tiny thing-events bombard us like cosmic, particles. Lying in a ditch outside is a scrap of newspaper with the date May 3, 1954. My Geiger counter clicks away like a teletype. But no one else seems to notice. Everyone is buried in his magazine. Kate is shaking like a leaf because she longs to be an anyone who is anywhere and she cannot.
The St. Louisan reads a headline
SCIENTIST PREDICTS FUTURE IF
NUCLEAR ENERGY IS NOT MISUSED
Out comes the gold pencil to make a neat black box. After reading for a moment he comes back to the beginning and is about to make a second concentric box, thinks better of it, takes from his pocket a silver knife, undoes the scissors and clips the whole article, folds it and places it in his wallet. It is impossible to make out any of the underlined passages except the phrase: “the gradual convergence of physical science and social science.”
A very good phrase. I have to admire the St. Louisan for his neat and well-ordered life, his gold pencil and his scissors-knife and his way of clipping articles on the convergence of the physical sciences and the social sciences; it comes over me that in the past few days my own life has gone to seed. I no longer