Lancelot

3

YOU WERE ASKING me how I felt when I discovered Margot had been unfaithful to me. Yes, that is very important if you are to understand what happened later.

First, you must understand that the usual emotions which one might consider appropriate — shock, anger, shame — do not apply. True, there is a kind of dread at the discovery but there is also a curious sense of expectancy, a secret sweetness at the core of the dread.

I can only compare it to the time I discovered my father was a crook. It was a long time ago. I was a child. My mother was going shopping and had sent me up to swipe some of his pocket money from his sock drawer. For a couple of years he had had a political appointment with the insurance commission with a “reform” administration. He had been accused of being in charge of parceling out the state’s insurance business and taking kickbacks from local agencies. Of course we knew that could not be true. We were an honorable family. We had nothing to do with the Longs. We may have lost our money, Belle Isle was half in ruins, but we were an honorable family with an honorable name. Much talk of dirty politics. The honor of the family won out and even the opposition gave up. So I opened the sock drawer and found not ten dollars but ten thousand dollars stuck carelessly under some argyle socks.

What I can still remember is the sight of the money and the fact that my eye could not get enough of it. There was a secret savoring of it as if the eye were exploring it with its tongue. When there is something to see, some thing, a new thing, there is no end to the seeing. Have you ever watched onlookers at the scene of violence, an accident, a killing, a dead or dying body in the street? Their eyes shift to and fro ever so slightly, scanning, trying to take it all in. There is no end to the feast.

At the sight of the money, a new world opened up for me. The old world fell to pieces — not necessarily a bad thing. Ah, then, things are not so nice, I said to myself. But you see, that was an important discovery. For if there is one thing harder to bear than dishonor, it is honor, being brought up in a family where everything is so nice, perfect in fact, except of course oneself.

You nod. But no, wait. The discovery about Margot involved something quite different. There was a sense of astonishment, of discovery, of a new world opening up, but the new world was totally unknown. Where does one go from here? I felt like those two scientists — what were their names? — who did the experiment on the speed of light and kept getting the wrong result. It just would not come out right. The wrong result was unthinkable. Because if it were true, all physics went out the window and one had to start from scratch. It took Einstein to comprehend that the wrong answer might be right.

One has first to accept and believe what one knows theoretically. One must see for oneself. Einstein had to be sure about those other two fellows before he took the trouble to take the next logical step.

One has to know for sure before doing anything. I had to be sure about Margot, about what she had done and was doing now. I had to be absolutely certain.

It was getting dark. The movie crew had gone. Margot, Merlin, Jacoby, and Raine would be back for supper. Elgin came with my toddy on a silver tray. Toddy! We never drank toddies or juleps as you recall, just bourbon straight or maybe with water, but with Margot it was toddies and juleps. She came from West Texas, where God knows what they drank, but she figured at Belle Isle and for Merlin it was toddies and juleps. No, even before Merlin.

I sat behind my plantation desk. Elgin sat in the slave chair, made by slaves for slaves. Margot claimed, I guess correctly enough, that the work of some slave artisans had the simplicity and beauty of Shaker furniture.

“Elgin,” I said. I had been thinking. “Did you happen to hear what time they got in last night? The reason I ask is I heard somebody, maybe a prowler, around two.”

Elgin looked at me. “They didn’t come in till after three.”

He knew who “they” were. After supper, Margot, Merlin, and the rest would usually go back to the Holiday Inn to view rushes from the past week’s shooting. It took a week because the film had to be flown to Burbank for developing. You have to use the same chemical bath, you can’t just drop it off at the local Fotomat. I invited, rather Margot invited, Merlin and Jacoby and Raine and Dana to stay at Belle Isle. They made so much noise coming in late with all their laughter and film talk that I took to sleeping in the corner bedroom. Then Margot suggested that I would sleep better in the pigeonnier. She fixed it up and I moved in, finally staying in the pigeonnier altogether. Even when the film folk moved back to the Holiday Inn, I stayed in the pigeonnier. Why? I looked around. What was I doing living in a pigeon roost?

“Elgin, there is something I want you to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

Elgin is, was, the only man, woman, or child I would trust completely outside of you, the more credit to him because it’s required of you, isn’t it? (Christ, what are you looking for down there? the girl?)

“Is the house empty?”

“Yes, sir. Mama’s done gone home and there were some late tourists. But they’ve gone. At five-thirty I had to ax them to leave.”

Elgin, age twenty-two, is a well-set-up youth, slim, café-au-lait, and smart — he went to St. Augustine, the elite Black Catholic school in New Orleans, knew more about chemistry than you and I learned in college. Then got a scholarship to M.I.T. He is well-spoken but to save his life he can’t say ask any more than a Japanese can say an r or a German thank you. If he becomes U.S. Senator or wins the Nobel Prize, which he is more apt to do than you or I. he’ll sure as hell say ax in his acceptance speech.

“Elgin, there’s something I want you to do for me.”

“Yes, sir.” He looked at me. It was then that I realized that for a long time I hadn’t asked him or anybody to do anything, because I hadn’t anything to do.

“You know the ‘hiding hole’ next to the chimney?”

“Yes, sir.” He relaxed: it is something to do with the house, he thinks, and the tourists.

The hiding hole was part of Elgin’s spiel to the tourists. That summer Elgin and his sister Doreen took turns leading the tourists through the house. They tell them the usual stuff — that though Belle Isle is indeed a small island now, surrounded by Ethyl pipery, in 1859 it had 3,500 arpents of land, harvested 2,000 hogsheads of sugar, had its own race track and fifty racing horses in the stable.

— that — and this is the sort of thing Peoria housewives oh and ah at: the marble mantelpiece was delivered from Carrara accompanied by two marble cutters, a right-handed one and a left-handed one, so they could carve the fresh-cut marble at the same time before the marble “hardened” (something marble does).

— that the solid silver hardware of the doors, locks, hinges, keyholes, taken for steel by the Yankee soldiers, no, not even taken, the metal not even considered, for what Yankee or for that matter who else in the world but Louis XIV would think of a sterling-silver door hinge?

— that all the rest, brick, column flutings, wavy window glass, woodwork, even iron cookery was made by slave artisans on the place.

— that finally, the most important to my plan, the hiding hole, no more than a warming oven let into the brick next to the fireplace but actually used as a hiding hole one day when nineteen-year-old Private Clayton Laughlin Lamar home on leave in 1862 hid from a Yankee patrol. This compartment, at any rate, was discovered to run the length of the chimney on both sides for three stories and so was fitted out later by an enterprising Lamar as a dumbwaiter to raise warm food to ailing Aunt Clarisse confined twenty years to a second-story bedroom for complaints real and imaginary, the same bedroom shared until recently by Margot and me and slept in now by her alone. Or did she sleep alone?

Elgin’s father, Ellis Buell, and I used to play in the dumbwaiter, letting each other up and down from living room to bedroom to attic. If there is something about a concealed hole in the wall which fascinates Ohio tourists, there is something about traveling in it from one room to another by a magic and unprovided route which astounds children. Children believe that a wall is a wall, that the word says what is and what is not, and that if there is something else there the word doesn’t say, reality itself is tricked and a new magic and unnamed world opens.

“Does that dumbwaiter still work?”

“That old rope rotten.” Elgin was excited. Not excited. Mystified. What am I up to? What he gon do next? He doesn’t know, but he’ll go along.

Late supper as usual. Margot, Merlin, Dana, Raine, and my daughter Lucy. Tex Reilly, Margot’s father, and Siobhan up on the third floor watching Mannix. A happy arrangement for all concerned because it got Tex and Siobhan out of the way without banishing them. Tex made his money by inventing a new kind of drilling “mud” but Margot thought he wouldn’t fit in with this company. She was ashamed of him. The other night they were blasting Hollywood as usual and the grossness of Hollywood types like Chill Wills. Fair enough. Chill may indeed be gross. The trouble is, Tex looks and talks a lot like Chill Wills.

It was after nine. Nothing was changed, except me. My “discovery” changed everything. I’ve become watchful, like a man who hears a footstep behind him. And sober. For some reason or other, since my “discovery” at 5:01 p.m., more than four hours ago, it had not been necessary to drink.

Merlin as usual went out of his way to be nice to me. He liked me and I him. His charm was genuine. He deferred to me as his local expert on the Southern upper class and asked good questions: “Was there much socializing between the English plantation society on this side of the river and the French-Catholic on the other?” (Yes, there was. They’d row back and forth across the river and dance all night.) His ear was sharp: “I notice people here, not necessarily the lower classes, saying something like: ‘Why you do me that?’ instead of ‘Why do you do that to me?’ Is that Black, French, or Anglo-Saxon?” (I didn’t know.)

His blue gaze engaged me with a lively intimacy, establishing a bond between us and excluding the others. Somehow his offense against me was also an occasion of intimacy between us. I felt it too. Things were understood and unspoken between us. It went without saying for example that actors are dumbbells. Not even Margot followed us when he spoke of Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” and Hemingway’s nastiness to Fitzgerald.

It was as if we were old hands at something or other. But at what? Why should there be a bond between us? But he listened with total attentiveness, leaning across to me over his folded brown arms. He was lean and fit and old, muscular, thick-chested, heavy shock of yellowed gray hair curling over one eye. He had emphysema, I think: his neck ligaments held his chest up like a barrel. No sign of considerable age except the white hairs sprouting over the zipper of his jump suit and the white fiber around his blue iris.

Margot had a triumphant night, I remember. They were worried about the “second unit” falling behind schedule. The second unit was supposed to shoot a scene, the opening scene of the film in fact, a flashback where the young son comes home from Heidelberg, steps off the steamboat at the plantation landing. They had rented a steamboat (a New Orleans excursion boat), found a landing in Grand Gulf, but the current was wrong and the boat could not warp into a landing. Days had been wasted, thousands spent.

“The board is four days out,” said Margot severely. The “board” was actually a board with paper chits stuck onto it like a calendar, showing the exact sequence of scenes to be shot. About Margot there was very much the sense of being a team member. She was in fact Merlin’s “executive assistant.”

What to do? Build another landing in a place with less current? More time, more money. Raine and Dana couldn’t care less. Lacy, my daughter, didn’t even hear. She was looking at Raine as usual, mouth slightly open.

Margot knitted her brows and drummed all ten fingers furiously on the table. “Jesus, we can’t lose another day.” She even enjoyed the hassles.

Margot saved the day. In fact her triumph was complete.

She snapped her fingers. “Hold it!” she said to no one in particular. “Just hold it. I may have an idea. Let me make one phone call.”

When she returned, she was flushed with pleasure and excitement, but she kept her voice offhand. “What about this, Bobby?” she asked Merlin, stretching up her arms and yawning. When she stretched up her arms like that, her completely smooth axillae flattened and showed two wavelets of muscle.

She had remembered there was a steamboat on False River, a cut-off backwater of the Mississippi. “It’s small, almost a miniature, but so are the landings there. And there’s no current. What we could do is a long shot of the boat coming into the Dernier landing, which is tiny, of a scale with the boat. I know the Derniers well. What’s more, the Dernier house even looks like a miniature Belle Isle. You could cut to the roofline over the levee and no one could tell the difference.”

Merlin thought about it. He nodded. “We’ll go with that,” he said casually, almost curtly, without looking at her. She could have been a pool secretary. “Okay. Call Jacoby.”

It was the businesslikeness of course which pleased her so much. Now she was not only one of them but a valued one.

When she was happy or excited, her freckles turned plum-colored. Her pigment darkened with the moon. I could gauge her sexual desire by her freckles.

Then surely my “discovery” was wrong. She was as happy as a child, so happy she reached over and hugged me, not Merlin. Merlin paid no attention to her. His white-rimmed blue eye engaged mine as usual. He wanted to talk about an article of mine, really no more than a note, about an obscure Civil War skirmish in these parts, published in the Louisiana Historical Journal. He had taken the trouble to look it up.

As usual I was first to leave the table. It was my custom (all of a sudden I realized how much of my life had become a custom) to leave them to their movie talk, pay a visit to Siobhan and Tex, and arrive at my pigeonnier in time for the ten o’clock news. It had become important to me in recent years to hear the news every hour — though nothing of importance had happened for years. What did I expect to happen?

But this time I did something different. I left the worn path of my life. Once out of sight, instead of crossing to the stairs. I turned left into the dark parlor next to the dining room, from which it was separated by sliding oak doors. A few minutes earlier I had noticed that the door was open some six inches. It was possible, standing with my back against the door, to hear the diners and by moving from side to side to see their reflection in the dim pier mirror on the opposite wall. The images traveled some fifty feet, thirty feet from diner to mirror, twenty feet back to me. Lucy, my daughter, was at one end of the table. Even from this distance it was possible to see in the small blur of her face how like and unlike her mother she is, Lucy, my first wife. There is the same little lift and lilt when she moves her head but the features are both grosser and more gorgeous, like a Carolina wildflower transplanted to the Louisiana tropics. For her, Lucy. Belle Isle was no more than a place to stay. We were not close. She and Margot didn’t like each other much. My son? I had not seen my son since he quit college and went to live in a streetcar behind the car barn.

Presently Lucy left.

Margot, Merlin, and Dana talked. There was the sound in their voices of my not being there.

Two small events occurred.

Margot leaned over Merlin to say something to Raine I could not hear, her hair brushing past his face. When Margot spoke, she had a way of swaying against her listener, so that her shoulder and arm touched him. He leaned back, absently, politely, to make room, but as her shoulder rose — is her hand propped on his knee? he took a mock bite of the bare brown flesh at his mouth, not really a bite; he set his teeth on the skin. So perfunctory an act it was, he hardly seemed aware of doing it. His fixed blue gaze did not shift.

“Okay,” said Merlin presently. “So we’ll use the pigeonnier for Raine and Dana’s fight. I agree. The checkerboard lighting pattern would be much more effective than a slave cabin. Still, I like—”

“What about Rudy?” Dana asked, I think he asked. Rudy? What was Rudy? Did he say Rudy? I don’t think he said Rudy.

No one seemed to be listening.

“What?” said Merlin after a minute.

Raine bobbed her head to and fro, propping and unpropping her cheek with her finger, hair falling away. She was humming a tune.

Again Margot leaned across Merlin to answer. I could not hear.

I could hear my absence in Raine’s voice. She was different. There had grown up between us a kind of joking flirtation. She was Dana’s girl, of course. But I could tell her how beautiful she was (she was) and unbend enough to kiss her when we met, kiss on the mouth the way they all do. She could tell me how beautiful I was (am I?). When we were in a room with people, there existed a joking agreement between us that she would be attentive to me, would not turn her back even if she is talking to someone else. It was as if we pretended to be married and jealous of each other. But now without me she was different.

Rudy? Who is Rudy? Me? Why Rudy?

Raine was humming a tune, or rather making as if she were humming a tune, a child’s head-bobbing tune, as if it were a signal.

Was the tune “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”?

Is that because I drink and sometimes have a red nose?

Is it because Rudolph had antlers?

Did Dana say Rudy? Actually I do not really think he did.

How strange it is that a discovery like this, of evil, of a kinsman’s dishonesty, a wife’s infidelity, can shake you up, knock you out of your rut, be the occasion of a new way of looking at things!

In the space of one evening I had made the two most important discoveries of my life. I discovered my wife’s infidelity and five hours later I discovered my own life. I saw it and myself clearly for the first time.

Can good come from evil? Have you ever considered the possibility that one might undertake a search not for God but for evil? You people may have been on the wrong track all these years with all that talk about God and signs of his existence, the order and beauty of the universe — that’s all washed up and you know it. The more we know about the beauty and order of the universe, the less God has to do with it. I mean, who cares about such things as the Great Watchmaker?

But what if you could show me a sin? a purely evil deed, an intolerable deed for which there is no explanation? Now there’s a mystery. People would sit up and take notice. I would be impressed. You could almost make a believer out of me.

In times when nobody is interested in God, what would happen if you could prove the existence of sin, pure and simple? Wouldn’t that be a windfall for you? A new proof of God’s existence! If there is such a thing as sin, evil, a living malignant force, there must be a God!

I’m serious. When was the last time you saw a sin? Oh, you’ve seen quite a few? Well, I haven’t, not lately. I mean a pure unadulterated sin. You’re not going to tell me that some poor miserable slob of a man who beats up his own child has committed a sin?

You don’t look impressed. Yes, you know me too well. I was only joking. Well, half joking.

But joking aside. I must explain my second discovery. After I walked out of the dark parlor, where no one ever sat, and quietly out the front door. I took a different route to my pigeonnier. A tiny event but significant. Because it was only when I did this that I realized that I had taken exactly the same route for months, even years. I had actually made a path. My life had fallen into such a rut that it was possible to set one’s watch (Suellen told me this) when I walked out the front door at night. It must be two minutes to ten because he likes to get there just in time to turn on the ten o’clock news. News of what? What did I expect to happen? What did I want to happen?

No. First, I paid a visit to Siobhan and Tex. who talked about runny babbits.

“I liked the bunny rabbits,” said Siobhan, hugging my neck.

“You like those runny babbits!” cried Tex, still holding out his hands for her and, thinking he’d made a joke, kept on repeating it: “I told you you’d like those runny babbits!”

Tex got on her nerves, in fact bored the hell out of her. It was almost as if he knew it and wanted to, enjoyed the mindlessness of runny babbits.

Siobhan escaped both of us, squatted under the TV livid in the phosphorescent light, her cloudy blue eyes not even then quite focused on the big-eyed cartoon animals.

Tex, of course, got on his next favorite subject, not chivvying Siobhan with his bad jokes but chivvying me for my neglectful ways. He couldn’t get over the fact that I had allowed Margot to rebuild the old burned wing of Belle Isle over a gas well even though it had been capped.

For the tenth time he upbraided me in his fond jabbing inattentive way. Was it his wealth, I often wondered, which gave him license to be such a pain, a prodding tunnel-visioned unheeding bore, or had he gotten rich because he was such a pain?

Yet he was a friendly-seeming pleasant-looking fellow with his big-nosed Indian-brown face, slicked-down black-dyed hair, liver-spotted muscular arms. At first sight one might take him for a golf pro, an old seasoned, whiskey-cured sun-drenched Sam Snead — until one noticed that he was not, that his way of standing around hands on hips was not like a golfer at all but the way an oilfield roughneck stands slouched at his alert ease, waits his moment while great machinery hums, heavy pipes swing, chains clank. Yes, that was it, that was his happiness and unhappiness: idleness can be happy only if the machinery is running and one looks on with a presiding interest, comforted as only machinery, one’s own machinery, can comfort. His sudden riches had stunned him. In the silence of wealth he felt deprived, deafened, and so he must reach out, grab, poke, drive Siobhan crazy.

“When are you going to cement that well in?”

“There’s nothing left down there but a little marsh gas, Tex.”

“How you get by with having a Christmas tree under your house beats me.” He can’t or won’t listen.

“It was put there before the state law was passed. Anyhow, it’s only a small shallow well.”

“It still has two hundred pounds of pressure.”

“Christ, no. Thirty pounds at the outside.”

“—two hundred pounds in rotten wartime black pipe.”

Christ, you stupid Texas bastard, why don’t you listen?

“It’s got to be sealed,” Tex droned on. “A Christmas tree won’t do it. The only way to seal a well is to cement it.”

“I know.”

“How in hell can Maggie seal a producing well and build a house over it?”

On he went, poking me like poking Siobhan, poking and not listening, not even listening to himself. His fond unhappy eyes drifted away. Even his expert opinion was nutty. In the same breath he complained about the well producing and not producing and didn’t listen long enough to hear the contradiction. Getting rich had made him so miserable he must make everyone miserable.

Why didn’t I do something about Siobhan, not about the well, which I couldn’t have cared less about, whether it produced or not, went dry or blew up, but why didn’t I do something about Siobhan? Either throw Tex out or give her back to Suellen or both. They’d both be better off. Christ, for all I knew Tex was fooling with her. Doesn’t it happen sometimes with fine fond upstanding grandfathers? You nod. You mean they’re penitent afterwards? Good for them. Suellen was good to Siobhan before and would be again. She had raised me, thousands of Suellens had raised thousands like me, kept us warm in the kitchen, saved us from our fond bemused batty parents, my father screwed up by poesy, dreaming of Robert E. Lee and Lancelot Andrewes and Episcopal chapels in the wildwood, and my poor stranded mother going out for joyrides with Uncle Harry.

Why didn’t I do something about Siobhan earlier? Here’s a confession, Father. Because I didn’t really care, and that had nothing to do with her not being my daughter (that made me feel better, gave me an excuse). We are supposed to “love” our children. But what does that mean?

Yet, and here’s the strangest thing of all, it was only after my discovery, after I found out that Siobhan was not my child, that I was able to do something about it. Since Siobhan was not my child, I could help her! It was simple after all: (1) Tex was bad for the child, (2) something should be done, (3) nobody was doing anything or even noticing, (4) therefore I would tell Tex to move back to New Orleans and let Suellen take care of Siobhan.

Why couldn’t I take care of her? To tell you the truth, she got on my nerves.

Why didn’t I love Siobhan when I thought she was my own child? Well, I suppose I “loved” her. What is love? Why this dread coldness toward those closest to you and most innocent? Have families ever loved each other except when some dread thing happens to somebody?

Oh, yes, you speak of love. That is easy to do. But do you wish to know my theory? That sort of love is impossible now if it ever was. The only way it will ever be possible again is if the world should end.

Siobhan turned fretfully to the TV to watch the animated cartoon.

“What a coinkidinki!” Tex cried, hugging Siobhan. “Just when you asked about runny babbits. Tex turned on the TV and there they were.”

“Say coincidence,” I told Tex.

“What’s that?” he asked quickly, cupping his ear, listening for the first time.

“I said, don’t say coinkidinki to her, for Christ’s sake. Say coincidence.”

“All right. Lance,” said Tex. He listened! Maybe he hadn’t listened to me before because I hadn’t told him anything.

I pondered. Could it be true all one needs to know nowadays is what one wants?

Leaving the pleached alley of oaks, my usual route, I cut across the meadowlike front yard, took the gardener’s gate through the iron fence, and climbed the levee.

Believe it or not. I had not seen the river for years. A diesel towboat was pushing an acre of barges against the current. It sounded like a freight engine spinning its wheels. I turned around. Belle Isle looked like an isle, a small dark islet hemmed in by Ethyl pipery, Dow towers. Kaiser stacks, all humming away. Farther away, near the highway, gas burnoffs flared in the night as if giant hunters still stalked the old swamp.

The stars were dim but by following the handle of the dipper I recognized Arcturus, which my father showed me years ago. My father: a failed man who missed the boat all around but who knew how far away Arcturus was. He was editor of a local weekly, where he published his own poems and historical vignettes about this region on such subjects as St. Andrew’s Chapel: the First Non-Roman Church in the Parish (I remember thinking that my ancestors must have arrived here to find the swamp teeming not with wild Indians but with Romans). The Kiwanis Club gave him a certificate officially entitling him the Poet Laureate of Feliciana Parish. He was an ordinary newspaper poet, an ordinary newspaper historian, and he had an ordinary newspaperman’s wonder about science.

“Think of it,” he said, standing in this spot and showing me Arcturus. “The light you are seeing started thirty years ago!”

I thought about it. In those days we thought about such things.

But what I was thinking that night a year ago was not how strange it was that light from Arcturus started out thirty years ago (when we were listening to Parkyakarkus and Frank Mann, the Golden Voice of Radio) but how strangely one’s own life had turned out during these same thirty years while Arcturus’ light went booming down the long, lonesome corridors of space.

Then for the first time I saw myself and my life just as surely as if I were standing in the dark parlor and watching myself sitting at the table with Margot.

Do you know what happened to me during the past twenty years? A gradual, ever so gradual, slipping away of my life into a kind of dream state in which finally I could not be sure that anything was happening at all. Perhaps nothing happened.

That, after all, is quite a discovery for the man you knew, president of the student body, all-conference halfback. Most Likely to Succeed. Rhodes scholar, Golden Glover, holder of the record of the Longest Punt Return in the entire U.S.A.

Clearly you haven’t done too well either. You know what our trouble was? We liked to go to school too much. And into the service. I managed to stay in school or the service until I was thirty-two. And you with your M.D., D.D. In fact, aren’t you taking some courses at Tulane now?

I practiced law in a small town on the River Road. I say practice in quotes, so to speak, because I found that I was doing less and less law as time went on. True, times got harder, business was slow. In the end I was doing a couple of hours of title work a day and that was it.

One good thing about small towns: it was convenient to come home for lunch. Margot was usually there at first. We’d have a drink or two or three before lunch — something she was used to doing with her lady friends in New Orleans. That was a pleasure. After Suellen’s lovely lunch, we often made love. Not a bad life! drink well, eat well, and make love to Margot. I fell into the custom of taking a nap. The naps grew longer. Then one day, I did not go back to the office in the afternoon. Instead, and as an excuse because it was said to be good for one, I took up golf. The three other members of the foursome were Cahill Clayton Lamar, cousin and failed gentry like me, bad dentist, good golfer; and two successful newcomers, the undertaker and the chiropractor.

But golf is a bore. I quit.

During the sixties I was a liberal. In those days one could say “I was such and such.” Categories made sense — now it is impossible to complete the sentence: I am a — what? Certainly not a liberal. A conservative? What is that? But then it was a pleasure to take the blacks’ side: one had the best of two worlds: the blacks were right and I wanted to be unpopular with the whites. It was a question of boredom. Nothing had happened since I ran 110 yards against Alabama — we lived for great deeds, you remember, unlike the Creoles, who have a gift for the trivial, for making money, for scrubbing tombs, for Mardi Gras. The sixties were a godsend to me. The blacks after all were right, the whites were wrong, and it was a pleasure to tell them so. I became unpopular. There are worse things than being disliked: it keeps one alive and alert. But in the seventies the liberals had nothing more to do. They were finished. I can’t decide whether we won or lost. In any case, in the seventies ordinary whites and blacks both turned against the liberals. Perhaps they were right. In the end, liberals become a pain in the ass even to themselves. At any rate, the happy strife of the sixties was all over. The other day I ran into a black man with whom I had once stood shoulder to shoulder defying angry whites. We hardly recognized each other. We eyed each other uneasily. There was nothing to say. He told me had had a slight stroke, nothing serious. We had won. So he bought a color TV, took up golf, and developed hypertension. I became an idler.

I gave up golf and stayed home to do a bit of reading and even some research and writing: the Civil War of course: nobody knew much about what happened in these parts. I even wrote a learned article or two. Sometimes I took the tourists around Belie Isle, like my grandfather before me. But instead of telling them Eleanor Roosevelt jokes as he did, I gave them scholarly disquisitions on the beauty of plantation life, somewhat tongue-in-cheek — to see how far I could go without getting a rise from these good Midwestern folk — hell, I found out it’s impossible to get a rise from them, they hate the niggers worse than we ever did. Things are not so simple as they seem, I told them. There is something to be said for the master-slave relation: the strong, self-reliant, even piratical master who carves a regular barony in the wilderness and lives like Louis XIV, yet who treats his slaves well, and so help me they weren’t so bad off on Belle Isle. They became first-class artisans, often were given their freedom, and looked down on the white trash. “Now take a look at this slave cabin, ladies and gentlemen. Is it so bad? Nice high ceilings, cool rooms, front porch, brick chimney, cypress floors. Great arching oaks back yard and front. Do you prefer your little brick bungalow in Lansing?” They watched me carefully to catch the drift and either nodded seriously or laughed. It’s impossible to insult anybody from Michigan.

On winter afternoons it began to get dark early — five o’clock. Elgin would build us a fire and Margot and I would have several drinks before supper.

During the day I found myself looking forward to radio news on the hour. At night we watched TV and drank brandies. After the ten o’clock news I had usually grown sleepy enough to go to bed.

So what was my discovery? that for the last few years I had done nothing but fiddle at law, fiddle at history, keep up with the news (why?), watch Mary Tyler Moore, and drink myself into unconsciousness every night.

Now I remember almost everything, except — Every event in the past, the most trivial imaginable, comes back with crystal clarity. It’s that one night I blank out on — no, not blank out, but somehow can’t make the effort to remember. It seems to require a tremendous effort to focus on. What I remember is that miserable Janos Jacoby looking up at me, the firelight in the trees … The headlines come back.

SCION CRAZED BY GRIEF. RESTRAINED FROM ENTERING HOUSE. HANDS BURNED.

That night. I can’t get hold of it. Oh, I try to, but my mind slides back to the past or forward to the future.

I can remember perfectly what happened years ago, like the time we, you and I, were riding down the river on a fraternity-sorority party and were passing Jefferson Island, which lies between Mississippi and Louisiana, was claimed by both states, and in a sense belonged to neither, a kind of desert island in the middle of the U.S., so you, drinking and solitary as usual, said to no one in particular: “I think it would be nice to spend a few days in such a place,” pulled off your coat, and dove off the Tennessee Belle (that was an “act” too, wasn’t it?); I, of course, having to go after you as usual, taking just time enough to wrap some matches in a tobacco pouch, and even so it took me three hours to find you huddled shivering under a log, looking bluer than Nigger Jim and more emaciated than usual; you, ever the one to do the ultimate uncalled-for thing — I never really knew whether it was a real thing or a show-off thing. And do you know, I’ve often wondered whether your going off to the seminary out of a clear sky was not more of the same — the ultimate reckless lifetime thing. Hell, you were not Christian let alone Catholic as far as anyone could notice. So wasn’t it just like your diving off the Tennessee Belle to go from unbeliever to priest, leapfrogging on the way some eight hundred million ordinary Catholics? Was that too an act, the ultimate show-off thing or the ultimate splendid thing? You shrug and smile. And as if that weren’t enough, you weren’t content to be an ordinary priest. Father John from New Orleans; no, you had to take off for Uganda or was it Biafra? You had to go to medical school and outdo Albert Schweitzer, because of course that was outdoing even him, wasn’t it, because you had the True Faith and he didn’t, being only a Protestant.

And it didn’t turn out too well, did it? Else why are you here?

Something is wrong, isn’t it? Have you lost your faith? or is it a woman?

Is that all you can do, look at me with that same old hooded look? You smile and shrug. Christ, you don’t even know the answer yourself.

But you left, you see. And you might have stayed. Maybe you were needed here. Maybe I needed you worse than the Biafrans. If you’d been around all those years … Christ, why is it that I could never talk to anybody but you? Well, you’re here now and I can use you. I’ve discovered that I can talk to you and get closer to it, the secret I know yet don’t know. So I’ll start behind it and work up to it, or I’ll start ahead of it and work back.

My mind slides forward, to the future, to the person next door. I have an idea even crazier than one of yours. It is that somehow the future, my future, is tied up with her, that we, she and I, must start all over. Did I tell you that I saw her yesterday? Just a glimpse as I ventured out on one of my infrequent forays, this time for my monthly physical and mental examination. Her door was open. She was thin and black-haired but I couldn’t see her face; it was turned to the wall, that wall, her knees drawn up. Her calves were slim but well-developed and still surprisingly suntanned. Had she been a dancer? a tennis player? She reminded me of Lucy.

Here’s my crazy plan for the future. When I leave here, having served my time or been “cured,” I don’t want to go back to Belle Isle. I don’t want to go back to any place. The only thing I’m sure of is that the past is absolutely dead. The future must be absolutely new. This is true not only of me but of you and of everyone. A new beginning must be made. People must begin all over again, as tentatively as strangers meeting on Jefferson Island (didn’t you have something like that in mind when you spoke of the “peculiar possibilities” of Jefferson Island?). I want to go with her, a mute, psychotic, totally ravaged and defiled woman, take her to a little cottage over there — close to the river beyond Magazine Street — a little Negro shotgun cottage, and there take care of her. We could speak simply. “Are you hungry?” “Are you cold?” Perhaps we could take a walk on the levee. In the new world it will be possible to enjoy simple things once again.

But first I must communicate with her, I realize that. Have you tried talking with her? She won’t talk? She’s turned her face to the wall and that’s that.

A new life. I began a new life over a year ago when I walked out of that dark parlor after leaving the supper table. Or rather walked into that dark parlor. Now I believe there will be a third new life, just as there are three worlds, the old dead past world, the hopeless screwed-up now world, and the unknown world of the future.

So anyhow I began my new life then when I stepped out of my life routine worn bare and deep as a cowpath across a meadow, climbed out of my rut, stopped listening to the news and Mary Tyler Moore. And strangely, stopped drinking and smoking. The second I left my old life’s cowpath, I discovered I didn’t need a drink. It became possible to stand still in the dark under the oaks, hands at my sides, and watch and wait.

I forgot to tell you another thing that happened in the parlor, a small but perhaps significant thing. As I stepped into the parlor with its smell of lemon wax and damp horsehair, I stopped and shut my eyes a moment to get used to the darkness. Then as I crossed the room to the sliding doors, something moved in the corner of my eye. It was a man at the far end of the room. He was watching me. He did not look familiar. There was something wary and poised about the way he stood, shoulders angled, knees slightly bent as if he were prepared for anything. He was mostly silhouette but white on black like a reversed negative. His arms were long, one hanging lower and lemur-like from dropped shoulder. His head was cocked, turned enough so I could see the curve at the back. There was a sense about him of a vulnerability guarded against, an overcome gawkiness, a conquered frailty. Seeing such a man one thought first: Big-headed smart-boy type; then thought again: But he’s big too. If he hadn’t developed his body, worked out, he’d have a frail neck, two tendons, and a hollow between, balancing that big head. He looked like a long-distance runner who has conquered polio. He looked like a smart sissy rich boy who has devoted his life to getting over it.

Then I realized it was myself reflected in the dim pier mirror.

When I returned to the pigeonnier cold sober, I took a good look at myself in the mirror, something I hadn’t done for a long time. It was as if I had been avoiding my own eye for the past few years.

Looking at oneself in a mirror is a self-canceling phenomenon. Eyes looking into eyes make a hole which spreads out and renders one invisible. I had seen more of myself in that single glimpse of a ghostly image in the pier mirror, not knowing it was I.

What did I see? It is hard to say, but it appeared to be a man gone to seed. Do you remember the picture of Lancelot disgraced, discovered in adultery with the queen, banished, living in the woods, stretched out on a rock, chin cupped in both hands, bloodshot eyes staring straight ahead, yellow hair growing down over his brows? But it’s a bad comparison. My bloodshot eyes were staring too but it was not so much the case of my screwing the queen as the queen getting screwed by somebody else.

I moved closer. The cheek showed the razor track of the morning’s shave; above it, the demarcated swatch of light fuzz on the knoll of the cheekbone. Capillaries were rising to the surface but had not yet turned into spiders. The nose was not broken, despite football and boxing, not red, blackheaded. The eyes showed a broken vessel and a blood spot like a fertile egg. There were grains in the lashes. The hair roots were not quite clean and were dandruff-flaked. The lips were cracked. The fingernails were black. The chin showed patches of beard missed by the razor. I shaved carelessly and washed seldom. More like Ben Gunn than Lancelot.

Five, six, seven years of unacknowledged idleness (it takes work to be idle and not acknowledge it), drinking and watching TV, working at play, playing at work — what does it do to a man? My hands were open in front of my face. The fingers closed and opened. I felt like Rip van Winkle waking up and testing his bones. Was anything broken? Was I still in one piece?

Was I still strong? How much abuse will a body take? I looked at my fist. I looked at the plantation desk. Raised chest-high originally so that the busy planter (busy with what?) could write his checks standing up, it had been lowered by Margot to make a regular desk. Good solid inch-thick walnut. I put my fist through the middle of the backboard. It went through. I looked at my fist. The knuckles were bleeding. The pain came through tentatively as if it were not sure it had permission. I thought: It has been a long time since I felt pain. I did ten pushups. My arms trembled; it left me sweating. I tried the Bowie knife test, do you remember? With my right hand I stuck the knife into the soft pecky cypress wall with all my strength. With my left hand I tried to withdraw it without working it to and fro. I could not. Then was my right arm strong or my left arm weak?

For the first time in years I bathed very carefully, scrubbing every inch of my body, washing my hair, cleaning and paring my nails, shaving every hair on my face. The bathwater was gray-black. I took a cold shower, scrubbed myself with a towel till the skin hurt, combed my hair, put on shorts. I lay down on the bricks and took a deep breath. The cold of the bricks penetrated the skin of my thighs. For years, I realized, I had lived in a state of comfort and abstraction, waiting for the ten o’clock news, and had not allowed myself to feel anything. When the base of my lungs filled with air and my viscera moved, I realized that I had been breathing shallowly for years. Lowering my chin, I could see the wide V-shaped flare of my ribs; the abdomen fell away out of sight. There was a cherry mole on my breastbone I had never noticed before. I had not looked at myself for years.

Raising my chin as far as it would go, I could see Margot’s painting of Belle Isle upside down. There was a year when Margot painted bayous, Spanish moss, and plantation houses.

I stood up. Can a man stand alone, naked, and at his ease, wrist flexed at his side like Michelangelo’s David, without assistance, without diversion, without drink, without friends, without a woman, in silence? Yes. It was possible to stand. Nothing happened. I listened. There was no sound: no boats on the river, no trucks on the road, not even cicadas. What if I didn’t listen to the news? I didn’t. Nothing happened. I realized I had been afraid of silence.

For the past year or so, I had been walking carefully, eyes straight ahead, like a man favoring a secret wound. There was a secret wound which I had not been able to admit, even to myself. Now I could. It was that lately I had trouble making love to Margot. It was the last thing I expected. For the best thing we’d always had between us was a joyous and instant sex. We also drank and ate a lot as well and it was very good between us. Once we were at a banquet at the Governor’s mansion, a meeting of the Landmark Preservation Society, Margot the president at the speaker’s table and in a gold lamé gown without underwear (because underwear made lines). She was eating green peas and in a few minutes would make a speech. I caught her eye. In thirty seconds we were in the Governor’s bathroom, which wouldn’t lock, but her bare ass was against the door, no lock required. Two minutes later husband and wife took their places, wife gave speech, husband ate apple pie.