“Yes?”
“You’re like me. So let us not deceive one another.”
Her voice is steadier. Perhaps it is the gentle motion of the train with which we nod ever so slightly, yes, yes, yes.
She says: “Can’t you see that for us it is much too late for such ingenious little schemes?”
“As marrying?”
“The only way you could carry it off is as another one of your ingenious little researches. Admit it.”
“Then why not do it?”
“You remind me of a prisoner in the death house who takes a wry pleasure in doing things like registering to vote. Come to think of it, all your gaiety and good spirits have the same death house quality. No thanks. I’ve had enough of your death house pranks.”
“What is there to lose?”
“Can’t you see that after what happened last night, it is no use. I can’t play games now. But don’t you worry. I’m not going to swallow all the pills at once. Losing hope is not so bad. There’s something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.”
“Very well. Lose hope or not. Be afraid or not. But marry me anyhow, and we can still walk abroad on a summer night, hope or no hope, shivering or not, and see a show and eat some oysters down on Magazine.”
“No no.”
“I don’t understand—”
“You’re right. You don’t understand. It is not some one thing, as you think. It is everything. It is all so monstrous.”
“What is monstrous?”
“I told you,” she says irritably. “Everything. I’m not up to it. Having a little hubby — you would be hubby, dearest Binx, and that is ridiculous — did I hurt your feelings? Seeing hubby off in the morning, having lunch with the girls, getting tight at Eddie’s and Nell’s house and having a little humbug with somebody else’s hubby, wearing my little diaphragm and raising my two lovely boys and worrying for the next twenty years about whether they will make Princeton.”
“I told you we would live in Gentilly. Or Modesto.”
“I was being ingenious like you.”
“Do you want to live like Sam and Joel?”
“Binx Binx. You’re just like your aunt. When I told her how I felt, she said to me: Katherine, you’re perfectly right. Don’t ever lose your ideals and your enthusiasm for ideas — she thought I was talking about something literary or political or Great Books, for God’s sake. I thought to myself: is that what I’m doing? — and ran out and took four pills. Incidentally they’re all wrong about that. They all think any minute I’m going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I’m as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself — ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide. And that reminds me.” And off she goes down the steel corridor, one hand held palm out to the wall.
None of this is new, of course. I do not, to tell the truth, pay too much attention to what she says. It is her voice that tells me how she is. Now she speaks in her “bold” tone and since she appears more composed, to the point of being cheerful, than her words might indicate, I am not seriously concerned about her.
But the roomette soon becomes suffocating and, not feeling up to talking business with Sidney Gross, I head in the opposite direction, stop in the first vestibule and have a long drink from my Mardi Gras bottle. We must be pulling into Jackson. The train screeches slowly around a curve and through the back of town. Kate comes out and stands beside me without a word. She smells of soap and seems in vaulting good spirits.
“Have a drink?”
“Do you remember going up to Baton Rouge on the train to see the football games?”
“Sure.” Balancing there, her oval face aglow in the dark vestibule, hair combed flat on her head and down into the collar of her suit, she looks like a college girl. She drinks, pressing fingers to her throat. “Lord, how beautiful.”
The train has stopped and our car stands high in the air, squarely above a city street. The nearly full moon swims through streaming ragtags of cloud and sheds a brilliant light on the Capitol dome and the spanking new glass-and-steel office buildings and the empty street with its glittering streetcar track. Not a soul is in sight. Far away, beyond the wings of the Capitol building stretch the dark tree-covered hills and the twinkling lights of the town. By some trick of moonlight the city seems white as snow and never-tenanted; it sleeps away on its hilltop like the holy city of Zion.
Kate shakes her head slowly in the rapt way she got from her stepmother. I try to steer her away from beauty. Beauty is a whore.
“You see that building yonder? That’s Southern Life & Accident. If you had invested a hundred dollars in 1942, you’d now be worth twenty five thousand. Your father bought a good deal of the original stock.” Money is a better god than beauty.
“You don’t know what I mean,” she cries in the same soft rapture.
I know what she means all right. But I know something she doesn’t know. Money is a good counterpoise to beauty. Beauty, the quest of beauty alone, is a whoredom. Ten years ago I pursued beauty and gave no thought to money. I listened to the lovely tunes of Mahler and felt a sickness in my very soul. Now I pursue money and on the whole feel better.
“I see how I could live in a city!” Kate cries. She turns to face me and clasps her hands behind my waist.
“How?”
“Only one way. By your telling me what to do. It is as simple as that. Why didn’t I see it before?”
“That I should tell you what to do?”
“Yes. It may not be the noblest way of living, but it is one way. It is my way! Oh dear sweet old Binx, what a joy it is to discover at last what one is. It doesn’t matter what you are as long as you know!”
“What are you?”
“I’ll gladly tell you because I just found out and I never want to forget. Please don’t let me forget. I am a religious person.”
“How is that?”
“Don’t you see? What I want is to believe in someone completely and then do what he wants me to do. If God were to tell me: Kate, here is what I want you to do; you get off this train right now and go over there to that corner by the Southern Life and Accident Insurance Company and stand there for the rest of your life and speak kindly to people — you think I would not do it? You think I would not be the happiest girl in Jackson, Mississippi? I would.”
I have a drink and look at her corner. The moonlight seems palpable, a dense pure matrix in which is embedded curbstone and building alike.
She takes the bottle. “Will you tell me what to do?”
“Sure.”
“You can do it because you are not religious. God is not religious. You are the unmoved mover. You don’t need God or anyone else — no credit to you, unless it is a credit to be the most self-centered person alive. I don’t know whether I love you, but I believe in you and I will do what you tell me. Now if I marry you, will you tell me: Kate, this morning do such and such, and if we have to go to a party, will you tell me: Kate, stand right there and have three drinks and talk to so and so? Will you?”
“Sure.”
Kate locks her arms around my chest, wrist in hand, and gives me a passionate kiss.
Later, just as I knew it would, her precious beauty leaves her flat and she is frightened. Another trip to the washroom and now she stands swaying against me as Sieur Iberville rocks along through north Mississippi. We leave spring behind. The moon hangs westering and yellow over winter fields as blackened and ancient and haunted as battlegrounds.