Lancelot (2 page)

I “fell in love” with Lucy Cobb from Georgia and married her. Then she died. Then I “fell in love” with Margot and married her. She died too.

Would it surprise you if I told you that I might be falling in love again? With the girl in the next room. I've never seen her. But they tell me she was gang-raped by some sailors in the Quarter, forced to commit unnatural acts many times, then beaten up and thrown onto the batture. She won't speak to anybody. And she has to be force fed. Like me she prefers the solitude of her cell. But we communicate by tapping on the wall. It is strange. Her defilement restores her to a kind of innocence.

Communication is simple when you are “in love.” Driving with Lucy Cobb through the Carolina summer night with the top down and the radio playing the “Limelight” theme, one could say to her simply:

“I like that, don't you?”

And she could say: “Yes.”

With the girl in the next room it is the same. Yesterday I tapped twice.

She tapped back twice.

It might have been an accident. On the other hand, it could have been a true communication. My heart beat as if I were falling in love for the first time.

Then you know my story? I know it too of course, but I'm not sure how much I really remember. I think of it in terms of headlines:
BELLE ISLE BURNS, BODIES OF FILM STARS CHARRED BEYOND RECOGNITION. SCION OF OLD FAMILY CRAZED BY GRIEF AND RAGE. SUFFERS BURNS TRYING TO SAVE WIFE
. No doubt I read such headlines. I wonder why the headlines are easier to remember than the event itself.

Now I've begun to remember some things perfectly. It was seeing you that did it.

The first thing I remembered was the exact circumstances under which I discovered that my wife was deceiving me. But what did that have to do with you? Memory is a strange thing.

The next thing I remembered made more sense. I remembered the first time I had seen you since childhood. You were sitting in the fraternity house alone, drinking and reading Verlaine. That made quite an impression on me. I remember wondering whether you were not trying to make an impression. What kind of an act is that, I wondered. (It was a bit of an act, wasn't it?)

Then this morning I remembered a great deal more. It was not as if I had really forgotten but rather that I didn't have the—the what?—the inclination to think about the past. I had got out of the trick of doing it. Seeing you was a kind of catalyst, the occasion of my remembering. It is like the first time you look through binoculars: everything is confused, blurred, unfocused, flat; then all of a sudden
click
: distance drops away and there is everything in the round, bigger than life.

I think I began to remember by remembering our likenesses and our differences: we both lived in old houses on the River Road on the English Coast, I in Belle Isle, you in Northumberland.

Though we would never have admitted it, we regarded ourselves as an enclave of the English gentry set down among hordes of good docile Negroes and comical French peasants. Our families were the original Tory English colonials who accepted Spanish hospitality in Feliciana Parish to get away from the crazy rebellious Americans. But we were united less by a common history than by our dislike of Catholics and the Longs. We were honorable families.

You and I were also classmates, fraternity brothers, and later best of friends. We went to whorehouses. I understand young men don't have to go to whorehouses any more.

There the resemblances stopped. Your family was rich so you went to prep school in the North. We were poor so I went to public high school. You were thin, withdrawn, and you drank too much, were said to be brilliant and to have the promise of a great future (did you?), yet you were obscure, almost unknown: when you graduated you didn't know six people in the entire school.

I was the opposite: the type who reaches the peak of his life in college and declines thereafter: prominent on campus, debater, second-string all-S.E.C. halfback, Rhodes scholar, even “smart,” that is, a sort of second-echelon Phi Beta Kappa. Being “smart” on the football team meant that you read
Time
magazine and had heard of the Marshall Plan. (“You don't believe he can tell you about the Marshall Plan? Ask him! He's one more smart sapsucker.”) They, my teammates, admired “smartness” more than anybody I've met before or since.

I achieved my single small immortality at the age of twenty-one when I caught an Alabama punt standing on the back line of the end zone and ran it out 110 yards for a touchdown. It is still on the record books as the longest punt return in history. The beauty is, it always will be—it can't be surpassed. It's like running the mile in zero minutes.

I was “smart,” but never smart in your complex way of drinking and reading Verlaine (that was an act, wasn't it?)

You were also belligerent when drunk and since you were built like Pope Pius XII, six feet and about 120 pounds, many was the time I had to save your ass from being whipped. (Yes, I was also Golden Gloves runner-up and though I weighed only 170 could take anybody on the football team, another source of astonishment to those Cajuns: “That son of a bitch beat the shit out of Durel Thibodeaux!” (defensive tackle, 265).

You were melancholy and abstracted and attractive to women but so thin I had to fix you up with big handsome motherly girls who didn't mind hugging your bones.

There was a difference in our families. The men in my family (until my father) were gregarious, politically active (anti-Long), and violent. The men in your family tended toward depression and early suicide.

Yet look who's depressed now.

You cock the same sardonic eye at me you cocked when you looked up from Verlaine.

As I say, seeing you allowed me to remember the circumstances under which I discovered that my wife had deceived me, that is, had had carnal relations with another man.

Is it this which was so difficult to remember? It is not that I forgot it but that I found it intolerable to think about. But why should it be intolerable? Is the sexual offense a special category and therefore unlike other offenses, theft, assault, even murder?

Or is it that the sexual belongs to no category at all, is unspeakable? Isn't sexual pleasure unspeakable? Then why shouldn't the sexual offense be unspeakable?

No, I didn't really forget anything. It was rather that seeing you allowed me to think about it. I wonder why. Because we were friends or because you are used to hearing the unspeakable? Or because seeing you reminded me of the pigeonnier?

But let me ask you seriously: Why is it such an unspeakable thing for one creature to obtrude a small portion of its body into the body of another creature? Is it not in fact a trivial matter when one puts it that way? I don't think women attach too much importance to it.

But suppose I put it another way. Isn't it unspeakable to me to imagine Margot lying under another man, her head turning to and fro in a way I knew only too well, her lips stretched, a little mew-cry escaping her lips? Isn't that unspeakable? Yes. But why? When I imagined other things happening to Margot, even the worst things, they were painful but not intolerable: Margot seriously ill, Margot hurt in an accident, Margot stealing money, even Margot dead, murdered. The thought of Margot dead was painful but not intolerable. But Margot under another man …

Hm. Do you think it is only our generation who put so much stock in it, the sexual connection, or as the kids say, got hung up? The ancients didn't seem to dwell on it too much; even the Bible is rather casual. Your God seemed much more jealous of false idols, golden calves, than his people messing around with each other. Perhaps God's jealousy is different from ours. I wouldn't have minded Margot kneeling before a Buddha. Then why should I worry about a small matter like Margot taking a small part of Merlin's body into her body? As a physician, wouldn't you say that nothing more is involved than the touch of one membrane against another? Cells touching cells.

Not even your church took it very seriously until recent years. Dante was downright indulgent with sexual sinners. They occupied a rather pleasant anteroom to hell.

And the present generation! Sex doesn't even seem to rate among the Top Ten experiences. I remember once I visited my son. He got out of bed, where he and his girl friend were lying naked and twined about each other, yawned, threw a sheet over her, then proceeded to tell me what was really on his mind: a guitar. A guitar! A certain kind of guitar. Oh, Christ, if only he could afford that guitar! Maybe I was good for four hundred dollars? As I wrote him a check I remember thinking: Very well, he lusts after, loves that guitar. But once he got it, would he mind somebody else playing it? Perhaps. But he wouldn't find it unspeakable.

My son got enough of women before he was twenty. Presently he appears to be a mild homosexual. But in either case, hetero or homo, it doesn't seem to count for a great deal to him.

Is it just our generation which got hung up on it?

You shrug and cock an eye at the cemetery.

Then is it just me?

I remember where I first discovered her adultery. In the room under the pigeonnier. Do you remember that room? You and I used to sit there on weekends or in the summer and drink and read aloud—you mostly—the dirty parts of
Ulysses
and
Tropic of Cancer
. That was a discovery for me too: that there were not only bad dirty books and great clean books but also great dirty books (yes! that's the connection: two discoveries made in the same place). When you and I went there, it was still being used by the pigeons, six inches deep in pigeon shit upstairs, and the cooing-chuckling going very well with Joyce and Miller read aloud. Downstairs was a junk room, an accumulation of the detritus of summer, crumbling hammocks and badminton nets and busted croquet balls, but dry and cool. Do you remember that summer? That was the year they drilled an oil well where the old wing of Belle Isle used to be (it too had burned mysteriously a hundred years earlier), and hit gas. For the first time since the war we had a little money. Do you remember poking around the junk in the pigeonnier and finding what looked like the original Bowie knife? Maybe it was. My ancestor did know Bowie, even had a part in the notorious Vidalia sand-bar duel in which Bowie actually carved a fellow limb from limb. At any rate, my grandfather made a good story of it when I showed him the knife, claimed it was one of the originals made by Bowie's slave blacksmith (though it wasn't: the original was made from a rasp and still showed the grooves), and displayed it as part of his spiel to the tourists whom he used to lead around Belle Isle at a dollar a head. He'd tell them Bowie stories and Eleanor Roosevelt stories.

Later Margot, discovering that the pigeonnier was an architectural gem, had it converted into a study for me. To her delight, after scraping off 150 years of pigeon shit they found the original cypress floor of two-by-twelves marvelously preserved, two-foot-thick walls of slave brick—even pigeons lived better than we do now. She found me a plantation desk and chair made by slave artisans and there I sat, feeling like Jeff Davis at Beauvoir. ready to write my memoirs. Except I had no memoirs. There was nothing to remember.

At any rate, it was there at 5:01 in the afternoon that I discovered purely by chance that my wife had been, and probably was still, unfaithful to me.

It is a mystery which I ponder endlessly: that my life is divided into two parts. Before and After, before and after the moment I discovered that my wife had been rendered ecstatic, beside herself, by a man on top of her.

My discovery occurred purely by accident. At exactly 5:01 p.m. the Ethyl whistle had just stopped blowing.

I happened to look down at my desk and saw something. Only on second sight—and I don't even know why I looked at it again—did it begin to take on a terrific significance.

My reaction was not what you might suppose. I can only compare it, my reaction, to that of a scientist, an astronomer say, who routinely examines photographic plates of sectors of the heavens and sees the usual random scattering of dots of light. He is about to file away one such plate, has already done so, when a tiny little something clicks in his head.
Hold on. Hm. Whoa. What's this? Something is wrong. Let's have a look.
So he takes another look. Yes, sure enough, one dot, not even a bright dot, one of the lesser dots, is a bit out of place. You've seen the photos in the newspapers, random star dots and four arrows pointing to a single dot. To make sure, the astronomer compares this plate with the last he took of the same tiny sector of the heavens. Sure enough, the dot is out of place. It has moved. What of it, thinks the layman, one insignificant dot out of a billion dots slightly out of place? The astronomer knows better: the dot is one millisecond out of place, click click goes the computer, and from the most insignificant observation the astronomer calculates with absolute certainty and finality that a comet is on a collision course with the earth and will arrive in two and a half months. In eight weeks the dot will have grown to the size of the sun, the oceans risen forty feet. New York will be under water, skyscrapers toppling, U.N. meeting on Mount Washington, etc.

How can such dire and absolutely verifiable events follow upon the most insignificant of evidence?

In my case, the evidence was not the minute shift of a dot on a photographic plate but a letter on my desk. No, not a love letter; no, I mean a letter in the alphabet. The letter
O
. I'll explain, if you're interested. Christ, you don't seem to be. Are you watching that girl I hear singing? I hear her every day. You know her, don't you?

I've seen you speak to her on the levee. She's lovely, isn't she? Clean jeans, clean combed hair halfway down her back. She crosses the levee every day. I think she lives in one of the shacks on the batture. Probably a transient from the North, like one of the hundreds of goldfinches who blow in every October.

One becomes good at observing people after a year, like an old lady who has nothing better to do than peep through the blinds. I observed that you know her well. Are you in love with her?