The Last Gentleman

he look like? I must find out.
    Stooping, he caught sight of a forest of oil derricks. He dressed and went outside. The camper was parked in the gravel plaza of a truckers’ stop. In the café he learned that he was in Longview, Texas. While he waited for his breakfast, he read from Sutter’s notebook:
    You’re wrong about Rita, Val. She saved my life and she meant no harm to Kitty—though that does not answer your charge. I had left the old ruined South for the transcending Southwest. But there transcendence failed me and Rita picked me up for the bum I was and fed and clothed me.
    The day before I left home I stood in a lewd wood by the golf links. My insurance had been canceled and I could not hospitalize patients or even treat them at home save at my own risk. The wood was the lewd wood of my youth where lovers used to come and leave Merry Widow tins and where I dreamed the lewd dreams of youth. Therefrom I spied Jackie Randolph towing her cart up number 7 fairway sans caddy and sans partner. Invited her into the woods and spoke into her ear. She looked at her watch and said she had 20 minutes before her bridge luncheon. She spread her golf towel on the pine needles, kept her spiked shoes on, and cursed in my ear.
    The innocence of Mexican country women.
    That evening my father gave me $100,000 for not smoking until I was 21.
    Looked in J.A.M.A. classifieds, found job in Santa Fe clinic, telephoned them my credentials (which were ever good), was accepted on spot, packed my Edsel and was on my way. Clinic dreary—found my true vocation at Sangre de Cristo guest ranch.
    Genius loci of Western desert did not materialize. Had hoped for free-floating sense of geographical transcendence, that special dislocatedness and purity of the Southwest which attracted Doc Holliday and Robert Oppenheimer, one a concrete Valdosta man who had had a bellyful of the concrete, the other the luckiest of all abstract men: who achieved the high watermark of the 20th century, which is to say: the device conceived in a locus of pure transcendence, which in turn worked the maximum effect upon the sphere of immanence, the world. (Both men, notice, developed weapons in the desert, the former a specially built sawed-off shotgun which he carried by a string around his neck.)
    It didn’t work. I found myself treating senior citizens for post-retirement anomie and lady dudes for sore rears and nameless longings. I took my money and bought a ranch, moved out and in a month’s time was struck flat by an acute depression, laid out flat in the desert and assaulted by 10,000 devils, not the little black fellows of St. Anthony but wanton teen-agers who swung from the bedpost and made gestures.
    I stopped eating. Rita found me (she was looking for volunteer MD’s for her little Indians), toted me back to her cozy house in Tesuque, fed me, clothed me, bucked me up, and stood for no nonsense. She saved my life and I married her to stay alive. We had a good time. We ate the pure fruit of transcendence. She is not, like me, a pornographer. She believes in “love” like you, though a different kind. She “falls in love.” She fell in love with me because I needed her, and then with Kitty because she thought I didn’t need her and because Kitty seemed to, with that Gretel-lost-in-the-woods look of hers. Now Kitty is “in love” with someone and Rita is up the creek. I told her to forget all that stuff, e.g., “love,” and come on back with me to the Southwest, where we didn’t have a bad time. But she is still angry with me. I forgive her sins but she doesn’t mine. Hers: like all secular saints, she canonizes herself. Even her sins are meritorious. Her concern for Kitty gets put down as “broadening her horizons” or “saving her from the racists.” And all she really wanted for Jamie was that he should get Barrett out of the way. She got extremely angry when I suggested it, though I told her it wasn’t so bad, that she was no more guilty than everyone else. Eh, Val? You want to know the only thing I really held against her? A small thing but it got under my skin. It was an expression she used with her transcendent friends: she would tell them she and I were “good in bed.” I am an old-fashioned Alabama pornographer and do not like forward expressions in a woman.
    Feeling unusually elated—then I am Kitty’s “someone”!—he stopped