The Moviegoer

tell me. Instead, in the streetcar, she becomes gay and affectionate toward me. She locks her arms around my waist and gives me a kiss on the mouth and watches me with brown eyes gone to discs.
    4
    IT IS TWO O’CLOCK before I get back to Gentilly. Yet sometime before dawn I awake with a violent start and for the rest of the night lie dozing yet wakeful and watchful. I have not slept soundly for many years. Not since the war when I was knocked out for two days have I really lost consciousness as a child loses consciousness in sleep and wakes to a new world not even remembering when he went to bed. I always know where I am and what time it is. Whenever I feel myself sinking toward a deep sleep, something always recalls me: “Not so fast now. Suppose you should go to sleep and it should happen. What then?” What is this that is going to happen? Clearly nothing. Yet there I lie, wakeful and watchful as a sentry, ears tuned to the slightest noise. I can even hear old Rosebud turning round and round in the azalea bushes before settling down.
    At dawn I dress and slip out so quietly that the dogs do not stir. I walk toward the lake. It is almost a summer night. Heavy warm air has pushed up from the Gulf, but the earth has memories of winter and lies cold and sopping wet from dew.
    It is good to walk in the suburbs at this hour. No one ever uses the sidewalks anyhow and now there are not even children on tricycles and miniature tractors. The concrete is virginal, as grainy as the day it was poured; weeds sprout in the cracks.
    The closer you get to the lake, the more expensive the houses are. Already the bungalows and duplexes and tiny ranch houses are behind me. Here are the fifty and sixty thousand dollar homes, fairly big moderns with dagger plants and Australian pines planted in brick boxes, and reproductions of French provincial and Louisiana colonials. The swimming pools steam like sleeping geysers. These houses look handsome in the sunlight; they please me with their pretty colors, their perfect lawns and their clean airy garages. But I have noticed that at this hour of dawn they are forlorn. A sadness settles over them like a fog from the lake.
    My father used to suffer from insomnia. One of my few recollections of him is his nighttime prowling. In those days it was thought that sleeping porches were healthful, so my father stuck one onto the house, a screen box with canvas blinds that pulled up from below. Here Scott and I slept on even the coldest nights. My father had trouble sleeping and moved out with us. He tossed like a wounded animal, or slept fitfully, his breath whistling musically through the stiff hairs of his nose—and went back inside before morning, leaving his bed tortured and sour, a smell which I believed to be caused by a nasal ailment known then as “catarrh.” The porch did not work for him and he bought a Saskatchewan sleeping bag from Abercrombie and Fitch and moved out into the rose garden. Just at this hour of dawn I would be awakened by a terrible sound: my father crashing through the screen door, sleeping bag under his arm, his eyes crisscrossed by fatigue and by the sadness of these glimmering dawns. My mother, without meaning to, put a quietus on his hopes of sleep even more effectively than this forlorn hour. She had a way of summing up his doings in a phrase that took the heart out of him. He dreamed, I know, of a place of quiet breathing and a deep sleep under the stars and next to the sweet earth. She agreed. “Honey, I’m all for it. I think we all ought to get back to nature and I’d be right with you, Honey, if it wasn’t for the chiggers. I’m chigger bait.” She made him out to be another Edgar Kennedy (who was making shorts then) thrashing around in the bushes with his newfangled camping equipment. To her it was better to make a joke of it than be defeated by these chilly dawns. But after that nothing more was said about getting back to nature.
    He made a mistake. He was trying to sleep. He thought he had to sleep a certain number of hours every night, breathe fresh air, eat a certain number of calories, evacuate his bowels regularly and have a stimulating hobby (it was the nineteen thirties and everybody believed in science and talked about “ductless glands”). I do not try to sleep. And I could not tell you the last time my bowels moved; sometimes they do not move for a week but I have no interest in such matters. As for