The Moviegoer

Kate and Binx are on a train to Chicago, three hours after she has decided to travel with him. Kate has dressed up and applied make-up, and “[o]n the way to the observation car she pulls [Binx] into the platform of the vestibule and gives [him] a kiss” (184). As soon as they sit on a sofa, Binx notices that a couple they know are sitting across the aisle. While Binx makes small talk, Kate looks for her capsules and Binx gives them to her, remembering that Sam had handed the container to him as he was leaving the Cutrer house. Kate leaves, and “[w]hen she returns, her face is scrubbed and pale” (187) and Binx realizes that encountering the couple on the train “spoils everything” (187). Binx feels drowsy and next to him, “Kate is shaking like a leaf because she longs to be an anyone who is anywhere and she cannot” (190). Kate leaves again, and Binx finds her in her room on the train. Kate talks again of Binx’s marriage proposal and reveals that Sam had also proposed to her. Kate speaks openly of her reservations: “I’m not up to it. Having a little hubby—you would be hubby dearest Binx, and that is ridiculous” (194). Kate goes on to talk of suicide, employing contradictions to express the complexity of her mindset. She explains that “[w]henever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I’m cheerful as a nit-wit” (195). The train stops in Jackson, and Kate raves over the beautiful nighttime views of the city. Soon, Kate again destabilizes, and they go to lie down in Binx’s room. At first rejects Binx’s overtures of love, but she and Binx quickly become amorous.

At this point in the novel, Binx begins to address someone named Rory, confessing to Rory that he was “frightened to death by her bold (not really bold, not whorish bold, but theorish bold) carrying on” (200). Binx explains that their “flesh failed us” (200), despite Binx having “never worked so hard in my life” (200).

Sam, a character Aunt Emily mentioned at the start of the novel, finally appears. His charisma and his bold confidence are foils to Binx’s quiet eccentricity. Sam appears to have been mesmerized by Kate the previous night, when Kate may possibly have deliberately attempted an overdose of her capsules. Kate’s description of the events of the evening are just as confusing as Sam’s, who claims to have talked with Kate for a long time while she was her most engaging self, which suggests that Sam, like others in the novel, is not as put-together as he seems. Despite Sam’s reliable reputation with the Cutrer family, Kate seems only to trust Binx with her true self. She invites herself along on Binx’s business trip to Chicago, bringing the whole story closer towards its climax.

Binx and Kate’s relationship intensifies when they travel to Chicago together by train. They try to be intimate in a sexual way, but their attempts fail, according to Binx’s mysterious descriptions of what happened between them in the sleeping car of the rain. While describing this flawed sexual encounter, Binx appears to be addressing someone named “Rory.” Some scholars believe Binx is addressing an actor named Rory Calhoun in these lines, an actor famous for playing romantic leads.

Binx and Kate arrive in Chicago, and Binx is determined to face the city and its “genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered” (202). Binx remembers visiting Chicago twenty-five years earlier with his father and brother, and then again after his brother died. Kate is in good spirits as they register at their hotel, where they again encounter the same couple from the train. Binx tells Kate that he needs to locate Harold Graebner, and they “have six drinks in two bars, catch buses, cross a hundred miles of city blocks, pass in the neighborhood of millions of souls and come at last to a place called Willmette” (207) where Harold lives. Binx and Kate drop in on Harold and his wife and their new baby, only to learn that they missed the christening by one day. Harold calls Binx “Rollo” and Binx tells the story of how Harold saved his life, but “[i]t is too much for Harold, not my gratitude, not the beauty of his own heroism, but the sudden confrontation of a time past” (210). Harold drives Binx and Kate to the train station and soon, they find themselves at the movies. While they walk home from the cinema, Kate has a feeling that “‘Something is going to happen’” (212), and when they return to the hotel, a message is waiting for Binx. He returns the operator’s call only to hear his aunt’s voice and to learn that Kate had not told anyone that she was traveling to Chicago. His aunt is angry: “[Kate’s] behavior is not unexplainable and therefore not inexcusable. Yours is.” (212).

Binx and Kate leave immediately for New Orleans by bus, as no trains or planes are available. They are both happy to leave Chicago, and Kate feels fine as “[t]he summons from her stepmother has left her neither glum nor fearful” (213). She sleeps the whole trip to New Orleans, and though it’s Mardi Gras, the bus has no tourists. Binx makes conversation with “a romantic from Wisconsin” (214), and he predicts that this young man will “scare the wits out of some girl with his great choking silences” (216). Then Binx chats with a salesman, “a better metaphysician than the romantic” (217). The bus arrives to New Orleans at dark, and only the “confetti and finery” (218) of the Carnival remain.