The Moviegoer

the house.
    â€œâ€”finally reached him in his hotel room in Atlanta.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œSam. He’s flying down first thing in the morning, instead of Sunday. He was quite excited.”
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œHe said he had the most extraordinary piece of news. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. It seems that by the eeriest sort of coincidence two things happened this very day with a direct bearing on Kate. Anyhow.”
    â€œYes ma’am?”
    â€œI have a hunch she’ll wander out your way. If she does, will you drive her home?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œIt isn’t as if Kate were another Otey Ann,” says my aunt after a moment.
    â€œNo, it isn’t.” She is thinking of two things: one, an acquaintance from Feliciana named Otey Ann Aldridge who went crazy and used to break out of the state hospital in Jackson and come to New Orleans and solicit strangers on Bourbon Street; two, she is thinking of the look in Nell Lovell’s eye, the little risible gleam, even as she reassured my aunt.
    I awake with a start at three o’clock, put on a raincoat and go outside for a breath of air.
    The squall line has passed over. Elysian Fields is dripping and still, but there is a commotion of winds high in the air where the cool heavy front has shouldered up the last of the fretful ocean air. The wind veers around to the north and blows away the storm until the moon swims high, moored like a kite and darting against the fleeing shreds and ragtags of cloud.
    I sit in the shelter outside Mrs Schexnaydre’s chain link fence. Opposite the school, it is used by those children who catch buses toward the lake. The streetlight casts a blueblack shadow. Across the boulevard, at the catercorner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants, is a vacant lot chest high in last summer’s weeds. Some weeks ago the idea came to me of buying the lot and building a service station. It is for sale, I learned, for twenty thousand dollars. What with the windfall from Mr Sartalamaccia, it becomes possible to think seriously of the notion. It is easy to visualize the little tile cube of a building with its far flung porches, its apron of silky concrete and, revolving on high, the immaculate bivalve glowing in every inch of its pretty styrene (I have already approached the Shell distributor).
    A taxi pulls up under the streetlight. Kate gets out and strides past the shelter, hands thrust deep in her pockets. Her eyes are pools of darkness. There is about her face the rapt almost ugly look of solitary people. When I call out to her, she comes directly over with a lack of surprise, with a dizzy dutiful obedience, which is disquieting. Then I see that she is full of it, one of her great ideas, the sort that occur to people on long walks.
    â€œWhat a fool I’ve been!” She lays both hands on my arm and takes no notice of the smell of the hour. She is nowhere; she is in the realm of her idea. “Do you think it is possible for a person to make a single mistake—not do something wrong, you understand, but make a miscalculation—and ruin his life?”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI mean after all. Couldn’t a person be miserable because he got one thing wrong and never learned otherwise—because the thing he got wrong was of such a nature that he could not be told because the telling itself got it wrong—just as if you had landed on Mars and therefore had no way of knowing that a Martian is mortally offended by a question and so every time you asked what was wrong, it only grew worse for you?” Catching sight of my sleeve, she seizes it with a curious rough gesture, like a housewife fingering goods. “My stars, pajamas,” she says offhandedly. “Well?” She searches my face in the violet shadow.
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œBut I do know! I found out, Binx. None of you could have told me even if you wanted to. I don’t even know if you know.”
    I wait gloomily. Long ago I learned to be wary of Kate’s revelations. These exalted moments, when she is absolutely certain what course to take for the rest of her life, are often followed by spells of the blackest depression. “No, I swear I don’t believe you do,” says Kate, peering into my face, into one eye and then the other, like a lover. “And my telling you would do no good.”
    â€œTell me anyhow.”
    â€œI am free. After twenty-five years I