Lancelot

2

COME IN, COME IN. Sit down. You still won’t? I have a confession to make. I was not quite honest yesterday when I pretended not to know you. I knew you perfectly well. There’s nothing wrong with my memory. It’s just that I don’t like to remember. Why shouldn’t I remember you? We were best of friends, in fact inseparable if you recall. It’s just that it was quite a shock seeing you after all these years. No; not even that is true. I noticed you in the cemetery day before yesterday. Still I hardly knew what to say to you. What do you say to someone after twenty years when you have already said everything.

It bothers you a bit too, doesn’t it? You are shy with me. But you like my window and my little view, I can see.

You still look doubtful. About my sanity? Well yes, after all, here I am in the nuthouse. But I remember you perfectly, everything we ever did, every name you ever had. We knew each other by several names depending on the oblique and obscure circumstances of our lives — and our readings. I bet I remember your names better than you. To begin with, you were simply Harry, when you lived at Northumberland close to us on the River Road and we went to school together. Later you were known variously as Harry Hotspur, a misnomer because though you were pugnacious you were not much of a fighter. Also as Prince Hal, because you seemed happy only in whorehouses. Also as Northumberland, after the house you lived in. Also as Percival and Parsifal, who found the Grail and brought life to a dead land. Also by several cheerful obscene nicknames in the D.K.E. fraternity of which the least objectionable was Pussy. Miss Margaret Mae McDowell of Sweet Briar, I want you to meet my friend and roommate, Pussy. Later, I understand you took a religious name when you became a priest: John, a good name. But is it John the Evangelist who loved so much or John the Baptist, a loner out in the wilderness? You were a loner.

So as you see, I remember a great deal about you. Right?

Ah, you smile your old smile.

Yet you prefer to look at the cemetery.

It makes a pretty scene today, don’t you think? All Souls’ Day. A pleasant feast for the dead: the women in the cemetery whitewashing the tombs, trimming the tiny lawns, setting out chrysanthemums, real and plastic, lighting candles, scrubbing the marble lintels. They remind me of Baltimore housewives on their hands and knees washing the white doorsteps of row houses.

A pretty sight, the bustling cluttered cemetery, the copper-penny-colored rain trees, the first fitful north wind blowing leaves every which way. If you listen carefully, you can hear the dry curlicues of crepe-myrtle leaves blowing up and down the paths like popcorn. When the wind shifts you catch a whiff of coffee and tar from the Tchoupitoulas docks.

In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are.

Well, I found out who you are. Your profession, that is. A priest-physician. Which is to say, a screwed-up priest or a half-assed physician. Or both. Ah, I managed to surprise you, didn’t I? Yes, someone told me yesterday. But it is more than that. It was something I observed.

You were taking a shortcut through the cemetery. One of the women scrubbing the tombs stopped you to ask you something. Obviously she recognized you. You shook your head and moved on. But what could she have asked you? Only one thing under the circumstances. To say a prayer for the dead. An old custom here, particularly on All Souls’ Day. You turned her down.

So something went wrong with you too. Or you wouldn’t be here serving as assistant chaplain or substitute psychiatrist or whatever it is you’re doing. A non-job. Are you in trouble? Is it a woman? Are you in love?

Do you remember “falling in love,” “being in love”?

There was a time when I thought that was the only thing that really mattered. No, there were two things and two times in my life.

At first I thought “being in love” was the only thing. Holding a sweet Georgia girl in your arms and dancing to the “Limelight” theme in the Carolina mountains in the summer of ’52, out of doors, with the lightning bugs and the Japanese lanterns.

Later I became coarser or perhaps more realistic. I began to wonder if there was such a thing as “being in love,” or whether the best things in life might not be such simple, age-old pleasures as ordinary sexual intercourse and ordinary drinking. Indeed, what could be finer than to be a grown healthy man and to meet a fine-looking woman you’ve never seen before and to want her on the spot and to see also that she likes you, to invite her to have a few drinks in a bar, to put your hand under her dress, to touch the deep white flesh of her thigh, to speak into her ear, “Well, now, sweetheart, what do you say?” Right? No?

But that’s falling in love too, in a way, isn’t it? Yet very different. I wonder which is better. To tell you the truth. I haven’t quite sorted it out yet.

But certainly “love” is one or the other, no doubt the latter. Sometimes I think we were the victims of a gigantic hoax by our elders, that there was an elaborate conspiracy to conceal from us the one simple fact that the only important, certainly the best thing in life, is ordinary sexual love.

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?

Ah, that does surprise you, doesn’t it? Listen to the girl. She’s singing.

Freedom’s just another word, Lord, for nothing

left to lose

Freedom was all she left for me

Do you believe that? Maybe the girl and I come closer to believing it than you, even though you surrendered your freedom voluntarily and I didn’t. Maybe the girl knows more than either of us.

But we were speaking not of astronomical categories but rather of the sexual. A horse of another color, you might say. Well, yes and no. There are certain similarities. Compare the two discoveries. The astronomer sees a dot in the wrong place, makes a calculation, and infers the indisputable: comet on collision course, tidal waves, oceans rising, forests ablaze. The cuckold sees a single letter of the alphabet in the wrong place. From such insignificant evidence he can infer with at least as much certitude as the astronomer an equally incommensurate scene: his wife’s thighs spread, a cry, not recognizably hers, escaping her lips. The equivalent of the end of the world following upon the out-of-place dot is her ecstasy inferred from the O.

Beyond any doubt she was both beside herself and possessed by something, someone? Such considerations have led me to the conclusion that, contrary to the usual opinion, sex is not a category at all. It is not merely an item on a list of human needs like food, shelter, air, but is rather a unique ecstasy, ek-stasis, which is a kind of possession. Just as possession by Satan is not a category. You smile. You disagree? Are you then one of the new breed who believe that Satan is only a category, the category of evil?

Yet how can such portentous consequences be inferred from such trivial evidence? I will tell you if you wish to know, but first I want to report my own reaction to my discovery, which was, to say the least, the strangest of all. You would think, wouldn’t you, that the new cuckold would respond with the appropriate emotion — shock, shame, humiliation, sorrow, anger, hate, vengefulness, etc. Would you believe me when I tell you that I felt none of these emotions? Can you guess what I did feel? Hm. What’s this? What have we here? Hm. What I felt was a prickling at the base of the spine, a turning of the worm of interest.

Yes, interest! The worm of interest. Are you surprised? No? Yes? One conclusion I have reached here after a year in my cell is that the only emotion people feel nowadays is interest or the lack of it. Curiosity and interest and boredom have replaced the so-called emotions we used to read about in novels or see registered on actors’ faces. Even the horrors of the age translate into interest. Did you ever watch anybody pick up a newspaper and read the headline PLANE CRASH KILLS THREE HUNDRED? How horrible! says the reader. But look at him when he hands you the paper. Is he horrified? No. he is interested. When was the last time you saw anybody horrified?

Yet not even my sad case seems to interest you. Are you listening? What do you see down in the cemetery? The women getting ready for All Souls’ Day? whitewashing the tombs, trimming the tiny lawns, putting out chrysanthemums real and plastic, scrubbing the marble lintels. Catercornered from the cemetery if you look close is what used to be the Negro entrance to the old Majestic Theater, now Adult Cinema 16. Remember going there when we came to New Orleans? We used to see movies like The 49ers with — who? Vera Hruba Ralston (the hubba hubba girl) and Charles Starrett, or was it Veronica Lake and Preston Foster? Or Robert Preston and Virginia Mayo? Now they’re showing something called The 69ers. From here all you can make out of the poster is a kind of vague yin-yang, showing, I guess, a couple, as if Charles and Vera Hruba had got caught in the vortex of time and gone whirling yin-yanged down the years.

Across the street you can make out the blackboard of La Branche’s Bar. What’s the specialty today? Gumbo? Oyster po’ boys, shrimp soup? And Dixie draught.

New Orleans! Not a bad place to spend a year in prison — except in summer. Imagine being locked up in Birmingham or Memphis. What is it I can smell, even from here, as if the city had a soul and the soul exhaled an effluvium all its own? I can’t quite name it. A certain vital decay? A lively fetor? Whenever I think of New Orleans away from New Orleans. I think of rotting fish on the sidewalk and good times inside. A Catholic city in a sense, but that’s not it. Providence, Rhode Island, is a Catholic city, but my God who would want to live in Providence, Rhode Island? It’s not it, your religion, that informs this city, but rather some special local accommodation to it or relaxation from it. This city’s soul I think of as neither damned nor saved but eased rather, existing in a kind of comfortable Catholic limbo somewhere between the outer circle of hell, where sexual sinners don’t have it all that bad, and the inner circle of purgatory, where things are even better. Add to that a flavor of Marseilles vice leavened by Southern U.S.A. good nature. Death and sex treated unseriously and money seriously. The Whitney Bank is as solemn as the cemetery is lively. Protestants started Mardi Gras, you know. Presbyterians take siestas or play gin at the Boston Club. Jews ride on carnival floats celebrating the onset of Christ’s forty-day fast.

I like your banal little cathedral in the Vieux Carré. It is set down squarely in the midst of the greatest single concentration of drunks, drugheads, whores, pimps, queers, sodomists in the hemisphere. But isn’t that where cathedrals are supposed to be? It, like the city, has something else even more comforting to me, a kind of triumphant mediocrity. The most important event which occurred here in all of history was the John L. Sullivan — Jim Corbett fight. Three hundred years of history and it has never produced a single significant historical event, one single genius, or even a first-class talent — except a chess player, the world’s greatest. But genius makes people nervous, including the genius, so he quit playing chess and began worrying about money like everyone else. It is altogether in keeping that the famous Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war was over and was without significance.

After the terrible events at Belle Isle, a year of non-events in a place like this is a relief. There is a sense here of people seriously occupied with small tasks. We, you and I, our families, were different from the Creoles. We lived from one great event to another, tragic events, triumphant events, with years of melancholy in between. We lost Vicksburg, got slaughtered at Shiloh, fought duels, defied Huey Long, and were bored to death between times. The Creoles have the secret of living ordinary lives well. A hundred years from now I don’t doubt that women like those out there will be scrubbing the tombs on All Souls’ Day, a La Branche will be polishing his bar, and a dirty movie will be playing across the street.

But in order for you to understand what happened at Belle Isle and why I am here, you must understand exactly how it was that day a year ago. I was sitting in my pigeonnier as snug as could be, the day very much like today, the same Northern tang in the air, but utterly still, sun shining, sky as blue as Nebraska cornflowers, not a cloud in the sky. I was reading a book. Yet even before I glanced down at my desk and discovered my wife’s infidelity, there was something odd about the day. You will understand this because we, you and I, used to have a taste for the odd and the whimsical.

For now that I’ve thought about it, things were a little odd even before my interesting discovery. There I sat in my pigeonnier, happy as could be, master of Belle Isle, the loveliest house on the River Road, gentleman and even bit of a scholar (Civil war, of course), married to a beautiful rich loving (I thought) wife, and father (I thought) to a lovely little girl; a moderate reader, moderate liberal, moderate drinker (I thought), moderate music lover, moderate hunter and fisherman, and past president of the United Way. I moderately opposed segregation. I was moderately happy. At least at the moment I was happy. But not for the reasons given above. The reason I was happy was that I was reading for perhaps the fourth or fifth time a Raymond Chandler novel. It gave me pleasure, (no, I’ll put it more strongly: it didn’t just give me pleasure, it was the only way I could stand my life) to sit there in old goldgreen Louisiana under the levee and read, not about General Beauregard, but about Philip Marlowe taking a bottle out of his desk drawer in his crummy office in seedy Los Angeles in 1933 and drinking alone and all those from-nowhere people living in stucco bungalows perched in Laurel Canyon. The only way I could stand my life in Louisiana, where I had everything, was to read about crummy lonesome Los Angeles in the 1930’s. Maybe that should have told me something. If I was happy, it was an odd sort of happiness.

But it was odder even than that. Things were split. I was physically in Louisiana but spiritually in Los Angeles. The day was split too. One window let onto this kind of October day, blue sky, sun shining, children already building Christmas bonfires on the levee from willows their fathers had cut on the batture. The other window let onto a thunderstorm. My wife’s friend’s film company had set up a thunderstorm machine in the tourist parking lot where ordinarily cars from Michigan, Indiana, Ohio would be parked while rumpled amiable bemused Midwesterners paid their five dollars and went gawking through the great rooms as foreign to them as Castel Gandolfo (never, surely, in history were there ever a stranger pair than those victors and us vanquished). A propeller on a tower blew rain on the south wing of Belle Isle, whitening the live oaks, and the thunder machine thundered, a huge stretch of sheet metal with a motor and a padded eccentric cam. They were trying it out. A scene in the movie required a hurricane. The propeller roared like a B-29, wind and rain lashed Belle Isle, the live oaks turned inside out, Spanish moss tore loose, the sheet metal thundered. But on the other side of the pigeonnier the sun shone serenely.

Margot had told me about it but I didn’t pay much attention. The movie was about some people who seek shelter in the great house during a hurricane, a young Cajun trapper, a black sharecropper, a white sharecropper, A Christlike hippy, a Klan type, a beautiful half-caste but also half-wit swamp girl, a degenerate river rat, the son and daughter of the house, even though there are no sharecroppers or Cajuns or even a swamp hereabouts and river rats disappeared with the fish in the Mississippi years ago. And I don’t even know what a “half-caste swamp girl” is. I am still unclear about the plot. The Negro sharecropper and the redneck’s father, who seem at first to hate each other, form an unlikely alliance to protect the women of the house against rapists of both races. With the help of the Christlike hippy, white and black discover their common humanity. There was something too about the master of the house trying to steal the sharecropper’s land, which has oil under it. My only contribution to the story discussions was to point out that the land could not belong to the sharecropper if he was a sharecropper.

The five o’clock whistle at Ethyl blew. I put the book down face up on my desk. It was the plantation desk Margot had given me, built high so a planter in a hurry could write a check standing up. I don’t think those fellows ever sat down and wrote a letter or read a book. She had the legs cut off to make an ordinary desk. My eyes fell off the print to a piece of paper beside the book. I remember everything! I even remember the passage in the Chandler novel. Marlowe was looking for a man named Goodwin. He walked into a house in a canyon between Glendale and Pasadena. An English bungalow! in Pasadena! Don’t you like that? A pleasant incongruity absolutely congruous in Los Angeles. Goodwin was living there alone. Where could Goodwin have come from? I was trying to imagine Goodwin’s childhood, Goodwin twelve years old in Fort Wayne before his parents moved to California. Try to imagine someone in Los Angeles with a childhood. Inside the house Goodwin was dead, a bullet through his forehead. My eye slid off his name — I remember it because his first name was Lancelot like mine — onto the paper next to it. It was my daughter’s application to a horse camp in West Texas. Margot had filled it in and left it for me to sign. Siobhan I thought was too young for a horse camp — yes, my daughter is named Siobhan. My wife Margot was born Mary Margaret Reilly of Odessa, Texas, so our daughter was named Siobhan. This was a special Montessori horse camp and Margot insisted (“I was raised on a ranch in West Texas and I am not about to have her miss it”). I didn’t like the idea of her fooling with horses, great stupid iron-headed beasts, but I always gave in to Margot. I reached for the pen to sign the application and the medical waiver and my eye slid over the page to the letter O. No, it was not the letter O but the number 0, cipher, zero. It was her blood type, I-0. I read the medical examination. At the least the camp people were careful. In case a child got kicked in an artery, they had her blood type. I-0.

I was looking at it idly. The thunder machine stopped. My head felt a little giddy but not unpleasant, as if I were dislocated and weightless in space — sliding instantaneously from an English bungalow in a Los Angeles canyon to an artificial hurricane to an absolutely still cool clear day in Louisiana. Once in a while an empty sugar-cane truck rumbled down the River Road.

Then it was that the worm of interest turned somewhere near the base of my spine. Curious. What was curious? The star dot was slightly out of place. But what was out of place here? I didn’t know yet. Or did I? At any rate, I found myself climbing the iron staircase to the pigeon roost proper. There I kept my regular office equipment, file cabinets, typewriter, and so forth, which Margot didn’t like downstairs where she liked to think of me as Jeff Davis writing his memoirs. Not having much to do over the years, I’d kept perfect records of what little I had done. Would you believe that I became meticulous? I’d have made a good C.P.A. Better a good C.P.A. than a half-assed lawyer. There in the file cabinet I found what I had not until that moment quite realized I was looking for: my medical discharge from the army. Sir Lancelot, as you called me, Percival, discharged from the army not bloody and victorious and battered by Sir Turquine but with persistent diarrhea. The army gave me the shits and couldn’t cure me. Three months in Walter Reed, the best doctors in the world, twenty thousand dollars worth of medical care, and they couldn’t cure the simple shits. So I came home to Louisiana, in August, sat in the rocking chair on the gallery of Belle Isle, downed a great slug of bourbon, and watched the river boats. Sweat popped out on my head and I felt fine.

Ah, here it was. My blood type. IV-AB. Again the worm of interest turned in my spine. I sat down in my metal swivel chair at my metal desk in the pigeon roost. It took Fluker two weeks to shovel out 150 years of pigeon shit, scrape the walls, and reveal what Margot was after, the slave brick of the walls and the three-inch cypress floor, not only not rotted but preserved, waxed by guano.

The sun was setting behind the levee and shafts of rosy light from the glazed pigeonholes pierced the dim roost like laser beams.

I began writing formulae on a pad of yellow legal foolscap. Isn’t it a fact that blood types are hereditary and that when the genes or chromosomes split, the A goes one way, the B the other, but never the A and B together?

There was an unknown in the equation. I did not know Margot’s blood type, but did I have to? Let Margot’s gene equal X. My gene had to be A or B. Two equations were possible.

X + A = O

X + B = O

The equations do not solve. X does not have a value. My blood type and Siobhan’s blood type did not compute.

So I telephoned my cousin Royal in New Orleans. You remember him. Royal Bonderman Lamar? No? You know, Raw Raw, little bitty towheaded sapsucker from Clinton, Kappa Sig, trip manager for the team the last year? Used to stand around at dances, hands in his gabardines, grinning like an idiot, stuff between his teeth? Yes? Actually he was smart as hell, is now an excellent surgeon, makes three hundred thousand a year.

I put the question hypothetically.

“You got a paternity case?” asked Royal. “I thought all you did was look after Margot’s money and help niggers.”

“That’s what I’m doing.” The worm of interest was turning. I remember listening for something in his voice, a note of superiority. In college I was the big shot, Phi Beta Kappa and halfback, and Royal carried the water bucket. Ever since, downhill all the way for me and up for him. While I was sitting under the levee sweating in my seersuckers, musing and drinking, he invented a heart valve. So I listened for the note of superiority which God knows he was entitled to. It wasn’t there. Same Royal, simply cheerful, grinning over the phone, stuff between his teeth.

“You mean you got a nigger paternity suit? I never heard of such a thing.”

“Just tell me. Royal.”

“Tell you what? Oh.” He was still the same Royal in a way. agreeable and willing. The horsing around and even the “nigger” business was not quite as it sounded though, but part of a new broad manner he’d hit upon, found possible, just as he’d found it possible to be grave and loving at weddings in the family and even unsmiling, put his arm around a niece, and, not quite as tall as she, kiss her and wish her every happiness and mean it. Not even the “nigger” business was as it sounded because he operated on blacks and whites alike and didn’t call them niggers or even by their first names and sat them down together in his waiting room and did more for them than I did. He outdid me in the race thing. He did more and talked less.

“No. A type IV-AB cannot beget a type O no matter who or what the mama is.”

“I see.”

“What you got is a nig—”

“I know, I know.”

“—ger in the woodpile.”

“I know.”

The thunder machine started up again.

“My God, what’s that, Lance?”

“A thunder machine.”

“A what? Never mind.”

“Thank you. Royal.”

“Give my love to Margot.”

“Right, right,” I said and almost forgot to say, Give mine to Charlotte. “Give my love to Charlotte.” I hung up.

Give my love. I thought of something and called Royal again.

“Is the period of pregnancy exactly nine months?”

“It depends on what you mean by month. Average gestation for a full-term infant is ten lunar months. Two hundred and eighty days. But why—”

“What’s the average weight of a full-term infant?”

“Male or female?”

“Female.”

“Seven pounds.”

“Thanks. Royal.”

“Okay, Tiger.”

Tiger. Did he call me that in school? Or was there a note of condescension?

“Thanks.”

My records were very good. In seconds I can, could — Jesus, the place burned to the ground, didn’t it? — no, still can. The pigeonnier didn’t burn and I guess the records are still there. I could look up any given day’s receipts of the tourist take at Belle Isle.

I made calculations. This time the equations were simpler. In fact there were no equations because there were no variables. It was arithmetic. I needed four pieces of data. I had two: Siobhan’s birthday, April 21, 1969, and birth weight, 7 lbs. Subtract 280 days from April 21, 1969. I looked at my feedstore calendar. The remainder is July 15, 1968. I could remember nothing. Can you remember where you were in the summer of ’68? You can? Yes, you would. You didn’t keep records but you always had a nose for time and places. I remember you stone drunk here in New Orleans, on the ground in the weeds, on the levee, peaceable and not quite unconscious, sniffing the soil and saying “What place is this?” Is that why you chose the god you did, the time-place god?

My third and indispensable item came from a shot in the dark. The dark of the dead file where I kept old income tax data and work sheets. A shot in the dark, not really a lucky — unlucky? — shot, but rather the only shot I had. My worm of interest tingled and guided me like a magnet to a manila folder neatly lettered DEDUCTIONS, 1968. I’m sure you don’t have to worry about deductions but it’s a good way to remember where you were and what you did ten years ago. A hundred years from now histories will be written from the stubs of Exxon bills. Bastardy will be proved by Master Charge. There was a chance I could find out where I spent the summer or at least hit on enough clues to remember the summer. Suppose Margot and I had gone to Williamsburg to talk to the National Heritage people about Belle Isle (we did one summer). A possible deductible. It would show: Coach-and-Four motel bill, Delta Air Lines carbon. Suppose I had spent two weeks in Washington with the Civil Rights Commission (I did that in the 1960’s). A deductible: receipted Shoreham Hotel bill. Suppose I spent a month in England buying antiques to show and sell at Belle Isle (I did that in the bad years). A clear deductible: Pan Am or Amex card. But where was I in the summer of 1968?

I found out. Not where I was but where Margot was. Was that the significance of the tingling of the worm of interest? that actually I already knew but did not know that I knew or would not admit it, had even suppressed the knowledge so thai it might then be properly discovered, just as the astronomer already knows in his heart of hearts that that dot will have moved but won’t even think about it until the photographic plate is in his hand and he can see the dot in the right-wrong place — all this in order to do what? In his case savor the superiority of the real over the imaginary? In my case to do what? postpone the interesting horror the way a person will turn an unopened telegram over and over in his hand?

Here it was. Amex stub and customer’s copy and receipted bill from the Arlington. Texas. Roundtower Motor Lodge for $1,325.27. A clear deductible. Not for me but for Margot, who at the time was still technically an actress, never a very good one but an Equity-card-carrying one and clearly engaged in the practice of her profession, that was why we deducted it, not acting but attending Robert Merlin’s workshop at the famous Dallas-Arlington Playhouse. The entire month of July. Eastern Airlines tickets for June 30 and return August 1. She had not come home and I had not visited her. I knew because all at once I remembered the summer of ’68. The courts had just caught up with Feliciana Parish and a few of us moderate and peace-loving persons of good will of both races had our own workshops, with the schoolboard and teachers and PTA’s, so people wouldn’t get killed when school opened. We succeeded. Nobody got killed. On the contrary. New life was conceived.

Siobhan then was conceived on or about July 15, 1968, give or take a few days. How many days? a week? ten days? two weeks? As Royal said, biology is not an exact science but a matter of averages and probabilities. So put July 15 at the summit of a probability curve and add or subtract two weeks in either direction along the x axis and, as I discovered later, the curve is so flat and close to the axis that breathing under it is difficult and conception damn near impossible.

A fact then: Siobhan was fathered in Texas in July 1968 and not by me.

The thunder machine started and stopped again. Someone was tinkering with it. A door slammed, the heavy front door of Belle Isle. I looked down through a pigeonhole. Margot and Jacoby and Merlin got in the station wagon and drove away. I’d have known it was Margot by the way she drove. Her hand made an arc through the green windshield. She turned the car like a man, or a Texas girl, not push-pulling with two hands but palming the wheel around with one hand. Looking down into the car from the pigeon roost, I could see her bare knees. When she got into a car she hiked up her dress like a man does his pants. They were headed, I knew, for the Holiday Inn on I-10 where the film company stayed and the manager let them have a conference room so Merlin could view the rushes.

The three of them sat on the front seat. Merlin in the middle next to Margot. Merlin was one of the few men I ever knew who couldn’t drive. There used to be more such people when I was a child, often quite gifted, intelligent men. Especially creative people. Picasso and Einstein never learned to drive, did they?

The girl in the next room and I communicated yesterday! She has not said a word for months, not since her terrible experience, but we communicated!

At six o’clock, when they brought us coffee, I knocked once as usual: good morning! To my astonishment, after a minute or two there came a timid little knock back: good morning.

I could not believe my ears. Perhaps it was not a reply at all. Perhaps she had turned over her chair.

So I knocked again. It was a tentative knock, a knock with a question mark. In thirty seconds, it came back. Knock. No mistake.

Yet was it a communication? If so, what kind? Two chimpanzees could do as well.

Still the question: Is that communication or imitation? Monkey see, monkey do. Perhaps the girl is lying there, a hopeless idiot, her eyes vacant, her knuckles straying against the wall, like a two-year-old child lying in bed.

So I tried the simplest code of all: One knock = A, two = B, and so on.

But how to propose it to her as a code? Not as easy as you might think. I spent the morning thinking it over. It became clear that the only way to avoid imitation is to ask a question and the only way to establish a code is repetition. After all, we have all the time in the world.

It is very awkward, of course. For example, my question began with a W, which requires twenty-three knocks. But no matter. Once the idea of a code is established, once she catches on, we can simplify.

I sent this message: 23 knocks pause 8 pause 15 double pause 1 pause 18 pause 5 double pause 25 pause 15 pause 21.

Who are you?

I knocked at about a one-second rhythm knowing she wouldn’t get it at first but thinking she might catch on and get a pencil and start counting.

No reply.

Repeat.

No reply.

Repeat.

No reply.

I tried ten times and quit.

Ah well. Tomorrow I will try again.

I must communicate with her. According to my theory, she may be a prototype of the New Woman. It is no longer possible to “fall in love.” But in the future and with the New Woman it will be.

You’re curious, I see. I haven’t told you my sexual theory of history? You smile. No, I’m serious. It applies to both the individual and mankind.

First there was a Romantic Period when one “fell in love.”

Next follows a sexual period such as we live in now where men and women cohabit as indiscriminately as in a baboon colony — or in a soap opera.

Next follows catastrophe of some sort. I can feel it in my bones. Perhaps it has already happened. Has it? Have you noticed anything unusual on the “outside”? I’ve noticed that the doctors and guards and attendants here who are supposed to be healthy — we’re the sick ones — seem depressed, anxious, gloomy, as if something awful had already happened. Has it?

Catastrophe then — yes, I am sure of it — whether it has happened or not; whether by war, bomb, fire, or just decline and fall. Most people will die or exist as the living dead. Everything will go back to the desert.

Do you believe that dreams can foretell the future? After all, your Bible speaks of it. I used not to, but I had a dream the other night and I cannot forget it. It was not about Belle Isle or my past life at all but about my future life. I’m sure of it. I was living in an abandoned house in a desert place, a ghost town which looked like one of those outlying Los Angeles neighborhoods Raymond Chandler describes.

I was in a room and strangely immobilized. I don’t know why but I could not move. Outside there were trees and other houses and cars but nothing moved. There was perfect quiet. Yet I was not alone in the house. There was someone else in the next room. A woman. There was the unmistakable sense of her presence. How did I know it was a woman? I cannot tell you except that I knew. Perhaps it was the way she moved around the room. Do you know the way a woman moves around a room whether she is cleaning it or just passing time? It is different from the way a man moves. She is at home in a room. The room is an extension of her.

She came out of the house. We were having a picnic, sitting on the tailgate of a truck. It was not the desert now. The land plunged almost straight down into the blue ocean. A breeze had sprung up and there was a tinkle of wind chimes. We had been working hard and were very hungry. We ate in silence, looking at each other. There was much to be done. We were making a new life. It was not the Old West and there was no frontier but we were making a new life, starting from scratch. There was no thought of “romance” or “sex” but only of making a new life. We knew what we were doing.

The New Woman is the survivor of the catastrophe and the death of old worlds — like the woman in the next room. The worst thing that can happen to her has happened. The worst thing that can happen to me has happened. We are both survivors.

What do survivors do?

Knock.

But she does not reply. Perhaps she did not survive. I’m surer of the catastrophe than I am of her survival.