Lancelot

5

JACOBY? I HAVEN’T TOLD you about him? The headlines? BELLE ISLE BURNS! DIRECTOR MURDERED AND MUTILATED! EX-GRID STAR HELD FOR QUESTIONING! Yes, I remember all that. Belle Isle burned to the ground except for twenty snaggle-toothed Doric columns. My hands burned trying to save Margot.

It is difficult to think about all that.

You must believe me when I tell you that it is the banality of the past which puts me off. There is only one reason I am telling you about these old sad things, or rather trying to remember them, and it has nothing to do with not being able to remember. I can remember. I can remember every word Elgin said to me in the pigeonnier. It is because the past, any past, is intolerable, not because it is violent or terrible or doomstruck or any such thing, but just because it is so goddamn banal and feckless and useless. And violence is the most banal and boring of all. It is horrible not because it is bloody but because it is meaningless. It does not signify.

Then why bother to tell you? Because something is bothering me and I won’t know what it is until I say it. Presently I’m going to ask you a question. Not that you will be able to answer it. But it is important that I ask it. That was always the best thing about you, that you were the only person I could ever talk to.

Why did you leave twenty years ago? Wasn’t Louisiana good enough for you? Do you think the U.S.A. needs you less than Biafra? I sometimes think that if you’d been around to talk to…

You are silent. Christ, you don’t know yourself.

I have to tell you what happened in my own way — so I can know what happened. I won’t know for sure until I say it. And there is only one way I can endure the horrible banality of it: and that is that I sense there is a clue I’ve missed and that you might pick it up.

It is as if I knew that the clue was buried somewhere in the rubble of Belle Isle and that I have to spend days kicking through the ashes to find it. I couldn’t do that alone. But we could do it.

A clue to what? To the “mystery” of Belle Isle? No. To hell with that. Belle Isle is gone and I couldn’t care less. If it were intact it would be the last place on earth I’d choose to live. I’d rather live in Brooklyn. As gone with the wind as Tara and as good riddance.

No, that’s not the mystery. The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time.

Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes?

Because there is a clue in the past.

Start with the present moment. Look out there. A fall afternoon in New Orleans with the peculiar gold light that fills the sky when the first wedge of Canadian cold air slides like a crystal prism under the Gulf steambath. Look at the gold light. It radiates in the crystal and filters down into the same shabby streets with the same neighborhood sounds of housewives switching on their Hoovers, TV, voices through kitchen doorways, the same smell of the Tchoupitoulas docks.

Consider the past. Imagine a man sitting in Feliciana Parish for twenty years practicing law (yes! “practicing”), playing at being a “moderate” or “liberal” whatever that is, all under the illusion that he was living his life and was not even aware that he was not.

But something happens. There is a difference. The difference between then and now is that now I’ve been alerted. I am aware of being the tape head. I am aware of this room being a tape head. That is why it is so simple and empty: so I can be aware. As you can see, it consists of nothing but a small empty space with time running through it and a single tiny opening on the world. I’m staying here until I can decide what the tape head is doing and whether I have anything to say about it. It is simply a devourer of time and does it necessarily turn the pure empty future into the shabby past?

A year ago (was it a year?) I made my two great discoveries: one, Margot’s infidelity; two, my freedom. I can’t tell you why, but the second followed directly upon the first. The moment I knew for a fact that Margot had been fucked by another man, it was as if I had been waked from a twenty-year dream. I was Rip van Winkle rubbing his eyes. In an instant I became sober, alert, watchful. I could act.

Yet something went wrong. I am glad you are simply listening, looking at me and saying nothing. Because I was afraid you might suggest either that I had done nothing wrong — like the psychologist here: no matter what I tell him, even if I break wind, he gives me the same quick congratulatory look — either that I had done nothing wrong or that I had “sinned”—and I don’t know which is worse. Because it isn’t that. I don’t know what that means. Yet obviously something went wrong, because here I am, in a nuthouse — or is it a prison? — recovering from shock, psychosis, disorientation.

From a state of freedom and the ability to act (that night I told you about, the world was open! I was free! I could do anything, devise any plan), I now find myself closeted in a single small cell and glad to be here.

A fox doesn’t crawl into a hole for a year unless he is wounded. But after a while he begins to feel good, pokes his nose out, takes a look around.

I still have the resolve to make a new life, an absolutely new beginning. But I know that one must start from scratch.

Begin with a burrow, a small clean well-swept place such as this, with one tiny window on the world and another creature in the next room. That is all you need. In fact, that is all you can stand. Add more creatures, more world, books, talk, TV, news — and we’ll all be as crazy as we were before. There is too much feeding into the tape head — the new tape is too empty — too many possibilities — but the recorded tape is too full.

But what went wrong with the other new life last year? I must find out so I won’t make the same mistake twice. Therefore I must go back and kick through the ashes of Belle Isle. There is something I don’t understand. And you are both my leverage point and my companion. Because you knew Belle Isle and you know me and I can’t tell anyone else.

In a month or so I shall be leaving here. At least that is my opinion, even though the doctors have not committed themselves. Perhaps Anna will be well enough to leave too.

Who is Anna? The woman next door. I didn’t tell you I had paid her a visit and she told me her name? She also ate something for the first time. Soon they won’t have to force feed her. How did that happen? Very simple. I just got tired of all that wall tapping. Yesterday I simply got up, went to my door, opened it, and went out in the hall — the first time I had ever done so voluntarily — and walked ten feet and there was her door. I knocked on it and went in. (Sometimes life is simple!) She was lying on her cot as usual, curled up, face to the wall, a tangle of hair on her cheek, thin hip upthrust in her hospital gown. Her brown boylike arms made a perfect V, hands pressed palms together between her thighs.

I stood looking down at her. She stirred.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Anna,” she said. That was all she said.

I decided to sit beside her. She stirred again, tucking her chin in her throat so she could see me past her cheekbone. I could see the gleam between her eyelids.

Her thin brown face reminded me of Lucy, except she didn’t have Lucy’s funny quirky expression and the tiny scar on her lip. Her face was blank, lips slightly parted and dry, like a woman asleep. She had a scar all right, not like Lucy’s, but a big white raised scar curving from forehead to cheek where she had been cut in the rape and beating. Her scar was like a whore’s. Do you remember our both making the observation that all whores have scars, belly scars from hysterectomies and abortions, face scars from beatings, leg scars from car wrecks?

“Here,” I told her. “Eat this.” In my pocket I had half a dozen Hershey kisses Malcolm (the guard — or is he a nurse?) had given me. I unwrapped the silver foil of one and offered it to her. She made no response. I put it into her mouth.

Do you know what she did?

She raised one hand from between her thighs, took the candy out, tucked her chin again, frowned, and looked at it exactly the way a child would, then closed her eyes, put it back in her mouth, and began sucking it.

Yes. Jacoby. He was there, I think, the night of the day I talked to Elgin. At any rate, there was one night I remember.

Janos Jacoby was full of himself. Youngish, short, black forelock which he kept whipping off his eyes with a toss of his head. He was either volatile fiery French-Polish or he knew how to act volatile fiery French-Polish or maybe both. Maybe he was from the Bronx. His accent varied — he had been an actor too and so didn’t know what he was. Sitting next to Margot, he gave all his attention to her, turning so far around in his chair that, his back to me, he was almost facing her. He had also gotten onto the foreigner’s knack of using his accent and even his mistakes to his advantage. Searching for a word, lips tensed European style, he would hold both hands under Margot’s face as if the word were there for both to examine. Though he ignored Raine and Dana — I wondered if all directors ignored all actors — he used his head, face, hands, lips like an actor, for an effect. An effect on Margot. She was charmed. Her eyes sparkled. Color rose in her cheeks. Her freckles darkened. His eyes swept past me, through me, as if I weren’t there. When she spoke, her shoulder swayed jokingly toward him. touching him.

Merlin, on the other side of Margot, seemed inattentive and bored. Using his spoon handle, he made long straight marks in the tablecloth. Once in a while Margot would sway the other way and touch him as if to draw him into the conversation, but he only nodded.

Earlier Merlin and Jacoby had been in an argument, Merlin talking about the indispensability of action and story in a film. Jacoby talking in a much fancier way about “cinematographic language,” “the semiotics of film,” “Griffith as master of denotative language.” “Metz as the only critic who understands the connotative film,” and so forth. What junk. I refused to pay attention.

Merlin finally shrugged and fell silent. I couldn’t tell whether Jacoby was trying to (1) upstage Merlin, (2) impress Margot, (3) do both, or (4) was speaking honestly.

Nor could I be sure whether Merlin was withdrawn because (1) Jacoby was paying too much attention to Margot, (2) he was bored by Jacoby’s fancy “cinematographic semiotics.”

Raine and Dana listened glumly. My daughter Lucy had managed to get herself between them and was in a transport of happiness, happy to be next to Troy Dana, whom she said she was in love with, but maybe even happier to be next to Raine, whom she worshipped as the casual possessor of those qualities most prized by Lucy and therefore, it seemed to her, most unattainable: beauty, fame, and that special “niceness” which Lucy could scarcely believe, Raine’s way of remembering the film crews’ names, the film crews’ wives’ names, servants’ names, and even the servants’ children’s names, taking time with her, Lucy’s friends. Raine’s ability to “act like anybody else, a real person” seemed to Lucy to surpass the most miraculous deeds of the saints. “She is the most wonderful person I have ever known,” Lucy told me.

I didn’t think Raine was wonderful. She was amazingly pretty, with a pure heart-shaped face and violet-cobalt eyes which seemed to look from her depths into yours, a trick I came to learn, that steady violet gaze, chin resting on the back of her bent hand. Her depths were vacant. But she flirted with me and that was pleasant. Her single enthusiasm, beside her niceness, was her absorption with a California cult called I.P.D., or something like that — Ideo-Personal-Dynamics maybe. She told me of it at length. I remember very little except that she said it was more scientific than astrology, being based not merely on the influence of the stars but on evidence of magnetic fields surrounding people. The existence of these fields or auras had been proved, she said, by special photography.

Cobalt eyes gazing straight into mine one foot away: “Did you know your magnetic field is as unique as your fingerprints?”

“No.”

“It is more exact than astrology because though we are both Capricorns, we are different.”

“Yes?”

“Many people are skeptical of astrology but there is scientific proof of this.”

“I understand.”

“Don’t you see the possibilities?”

“Possibilities?”

“For the future, for mankind, for preventing wars.”

“How’s that?”

“Everyone could have his ideogram, which is a scientific reading of his magnetic field. Some ideograms are clearly stronger than others or incompatible with others. If the President of the United States has a weak ideogram, it would be stupid to send him to a summit meeting. It’s the ultimate weapon against Communism.”

“I can see how it would be.”

The actors, I noticed, took a light passing interest in everything, current events, Scientology, politics. They were hardly here at all, in Louisiana that is, but were blown about this way and that, like puffballs, in and out of their roles, “into” Christian Science, back out again.

“I find it a tremendous help in both my personal and professional life. Wouldn’t you like to have a reading? You know. I think you underrate yourself.” She said it all in a single breath.

“Well, no, that is, yes, sure. Will you give me a reading?”

“Will I ever give you a reading!”

The trouble was that even when she was on this, her favorite subject, her voice went flat and trailed off. Her eyes were steady but unfocused. I had the feeling she wasn’t listening to herself. Could it be that her I.P.D. was a trick too, not a trick she played on me but on herself, a way of filling up time?

Merlin and Jacoby argued about the movies they were making, or rather Jacoby seemed to be making, because although Merlin was the producer-director and Jacoby co-director, it was Jacoby who ran the set, yelling at actors and grips, even ordering local residents out of their own houses. It amazed me how meekly, even joyfully, the locals received these bad manners. Anything to be in a movie, or somehow connected with a movie. Then I thought: Listen who’s talking and who’s been kicked out of his own house.

They were arguing about the scene where the poor white sharecropper rapes the aristocratic girl in the loft of the pigeonnier.

“Of course you must realize”—said Jacoby, leaning over Margot, drawling and moving his lips muscularly—“that at this point something very important happens, Bob. Because what starts out to be a rape, an act of violence which comes from his own — how do you say, being caught—”

“Trapped,” said Margot, pulling back slightly from Jacoby’s face.

“Yes! Trapped by being a sharecropper and so hitting out at those people, his—”

“Oppressors.”

“Right! But a moment occurs when all this disappears and the girl through her own femaleness, feminineness, what? turns this moment into something else, that is, a man and a woman—”

“Don’t you mean, Jan,” said Margot, her eyes glowing, “that the girl with her own gift for tenderness and caring converts a moment of violence into a moment of love? Isn’t it a transformation of a political act by an erotic act?”

“Oh, Margot, you are right!” She made him happy. “Exactly. It is a transforming of the political into the erotic.”

Merlin roused slightly. “It is true, I agree. Margot speaks of love. Very well. Love is great. Love conquers all. But here we are content with the erotic — this pair hardly know each other. But the point is that violence, rape or murder, or whatever, is always death-dealing whereas the erotic, in any form at all, is always life-enhancing.”

“Yes! That’s the nice swing, what you say, switch, don’t you see, Margot?” Jacoby turned his black eyes on her. “It is the aristocrat in this case who has the life-enhancing principle and not the sharecropper, as is usually the case, since he is usually shown as coming from the dirt.”

“Soil,” said Margot.

Was he from the Bronx or Brno?

“Yes, and even though she comes from racism, which is equally death-dealing since it is geno—”

“Genocidal. Since a whole race is involved.”

When Janos searched for a word, his eyes roamed past me, through me, to the dark corners of the room. I felt like an actor.

“And the sharecropper is always wavering between the two, the life and death principle. The girl guides him toward life through the erotic. She is his Beatrice.” Bay-ah-tree-chay.

What irritated me was that despite myself I wanted to be noticed by Janos Jacoby — why for God’s sake? for Margot’s sake? and found myself trying to think of something impressive like “cinematographic semiotics.” But when his eyes swept past me, through me, for the fifth time, I gave it up and decided to satisfy my own curiosity.

So I asked him: “What about the scene between the sheriff and the black sharecropper’s daughter?”

“Eh?” Jacoby swung around as if to locate the origin of this unfamiliar voice. “Ah. I am not sure I know what you mean, ah — what about it?” I swear I don’t think he knew my name.

“Well, he is both erotic and racist and therefore both life-enhancing and death-dealing. Having had intercourse with her, which was by no means rape, where does that leave him, canceled out so to speak, half bad half good, back at zero?”

Silence. Jacoby and Merlin looked at each other. Margot, between them, blushed. Was she blushing for me?

Jacoby sighed and shook his head. Merlin undertook to explain. “Wouldn’t you agree, Lance, that there is such a thing as a sexist violent eroticism which is quite as exploitative as rape itself?”

“No. I don’t understand that.”

Again silence. Eyes averted. It was as if there was a turd, somehow mine, on the snowy tablecloth between us.

“Darling, what you don’t realize,” said Margot, blushing and taking my hand across the table, “is that the sheriff is performing an out-and-out sexist act of aggression and treats the black girl as a sex object.”

“I see.” I was looking at Ellis Buell, who was passing the crawfish étouffé. His eyes caught mine. But they were shuttered and did not signify.

After supper I paid my usual visit to Tex and Siobhan. They were in the library on the third floor where my father used to keep his books of Romantic English poetry, Southern history, Robert E. Lee biographies (Robert E. Lee was his saint; he loved him the way Catholics love St. Francis. If the South were Catholic, we’d have long since had an order of St. Robert E. Lee, a stern military Christian order like the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel — hell, I’m not sure we don’t), Louisiana history, Feliciana Parish history, Episcopal Church history, the Waverley novels, Jean Christophe, Saint-Exupéry, Admiral Byrd’s Alone, H. G. Wells’s The Science of Life, the Life of James Bowie—a strange collection in which I could detect no common denominator except a taste for the extraordinary and marvelous, the sentimental, the extraordinary experience, the extraordinary adventure undertaken by a brave few, the extraordinary life of genius, the extraordinary stunt of H. G. Wells in taking on all of life, the extraordinary glory of a lost cause which becomes more extraordinary as it recedes in time and in fact Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia had long since become for him as legendary and mythical as King Arthur and the Round Table. Do you think I was named Lancelot for nothing? The Andrewes was tacked on by him to give it Episcopal sanction, but what he really had in mind and in his heart wanted to be and couldn’t have been more different from was that old nonexistent Catholic brawler and adulterer, Lancelot du Lac, King Ban of Benwick’s son, knight of the Round Table and — here was the part he could never get over — one of only two knights to see the Grail (you, Percival, the other); and above all the extraordinariness of those chaste and incorrupt little Anglican chapels set down in this violent and corrupt land besieged on all sides by savage Indians, superstitious Romans, mealy-mouthed Baptists, howling Holy Rollers.

Siobhan was cross and nervous. She was a bright thin wiry perfect little blonde(!), her beauty spoiled only by clouded eyes and a petulant expression.

Tex fancied they were close, that she couldn’t get along with her mother, that he had saved her from the niggers. Actually he got on her nerves and she’d have been better off with the niggers. He had a fond insistent yet inattentive way with her which parodied affection and didn’t fool her. Indeed, it was as if he were out to irritate her.

She ran to give me a hug and a kiss. I hugged and kissed her back, feeling her thin little bones in her grownup full-length nylon nightgown. She hugged me too hard, making her arms tremble; her clouded blue eyes didn’t quite focus on me. She had learned Tex’s trick of parody. They had been watching a cartoon on TV. “What do you think of that cute little fawn?” he asked several times in his mindless singsong, reaching out for her. He too liked to feel her little bones. At seven she was as sexual a creature as her mother but in a dim clouded approximation of it, as if she had forgotten something or was about to remember it. She could curve her lips richly but her eyes were as opaque as a doll’s. She liked to show her body and would sit, dress pulled up, arms clasping knees, her little biscuit showing.

Did I love Margot? I’m not sure what you mean, what that word means, but it was good between us. The best times were the sudden unprovided times: leaving the office at ten o’clock, three o’clock, any time at all, going home to Belle Isle to pick her up, snatching her out over protests from her restorations, her as sweaty and plaster-powdered as the workmen restoring Belle Isle to a splendor it had never known; she frowning and fussing and reluctant at first, even then torn a little between me and Belle Isle. In the end we both lost out, the house and I, but she happy as I to be in the old Buick convertible beside me, top down, headed anywhere and nowhere, maybe up the Natchez Trace, singing through dark and bright, the perpetual twilight of the deep loess cuts smelling of earth, and out into the little bright meadows and the pine-winey sunlight, the singing cicadas keeping up with us like the Buick’s shadow, she as close as close not forbearing to kiss my neck and cheek over and over again, my hand between her thighs, the radio playing Country Western, which she really liked, hell-bent though she was not to miss a single New Orleans symphony concert; cutoff on a cowpath and sit in the grass, the whiskey and Seven-Up between us, Kristofferson singing and she forgetting Ludwig Beethoven and singing too.

Freedom’s just another word. Lord, for nothing left to lose

Nothing ain’t worth nothing, Lord, but it’s free

Feeling good was easy, Lord, when Bobby sang the blues

Feeling good was good enough for me

Good enough for me and Bobby McGee.

Bobby McGee got away, but she wasn’t getting away from me. I didn’t want freedom, I wanted her beside me on the grass, the sun making copper lights on her coarse springy hair, her miraculous gold skin glowing with a sunlight all its own. Pass the bottle, pass the Seven-Up, kiss her sweet lips, lie with her, both of us dry-sweated from different sweats, mine law-office seersucker Blackstone calfskin sweat, hers the clean bathed housewife’s morning sweat. Kissing her mouth was kissing the day itself, the October sunlight and whiskey and Seven-Up on her lips and she herself in her mouth, her woman’s inside taste yet hers alone too, the special odd astringent chemistry of Mary Margaret Reilly’s own saliva.

Love her? I’m not sure what words mean any more, but I loved her if loving her is wanting her all the time, wanting even the sight of her, and being away from her was like being short of breath, and seeing her, just catching sight of her at a distance, was a homecoming to a happy home and a rising of heart. Once I even laughed and clapped my hands when I turned into Belle Isle and saw her on the gallery. I felt like my ancestor Clayton Laughlin Lamar coming home from Virginia in 1865.

Lucy I loved too, but Lucy was a dream, a slim brown dancer in a bell jar spinning round and round in the “Limelight” music of old gone Carolina long ago. Margot was life itself as if all Louisiana, its fecund oil-rich dark greens and haunted twilights, its very fakery and money-loving and comicalness, had all been gathered and fleshed out in one creature. It meant having her and not being haunted, holding all of goldgreen Louisiana in my arms. She was a big girl.

Later we lived by sexual delights and the triumphs of architectural restoration. Truthfully, at that time I don’t know which she enjoyed more, a good piece in Henry Clay’s bed or Henry Clay’s bed. Once a couple of years ago when we were making love, I saw her arm stretch back in a way she had, but now not to grab the bedpost as a point of anchorage or leverage in the storm-tossed sea of love, to hold on for dear life — no, not at all: this time as her arm stretched up her fingers explored the fine oiled restored texture of the mahogany, her nails traced the delicate fluting of the heavy columns.

Later than that, when I took to the bottle — a different love story — and became a poor lover, once again inattentive and haunted, she came to prefer restoration to love. Certain architectural triumphs became for her like orgasms, like the time she dug up a ninety-year-old plaster craftsman in Bunkie, Louisiana, when everybody had told her they had all died, she having discovered old accurate sketches of the plaster roses in the ceilings of the burned wing of Belle Isle. Her face glowed: bringing together the two, the sketches and the long-lost craftsman, and seeing the great shallow roses take form was, I saw, as good for her as sexual love, at the time better in fact.

Then what happened between me and Margot?

If she was here, I know what she’d say and she’d be right as far as she went: Instead of loving me, you crawled into a bottle and I just decided I’d be damned if I’d crawl in with you. You made your decision.

But she’d also be partly wrong. The simple and amazing truth is that when she finished fixing up Belle Isle, she also somehow finished with me. The house Belle Isle was she herself, a Louisiana belle, and when she had done it over and done herself over just right and had finished with me, a proper Louisiana gent — after she had done us both, she was through with both. Once she’d done every conceivable bit of restoration, poring over old sketches, enlisting historians, importing Carrara marble carvers — once she was finished, we were finished — the only important thing for her was that everything had to be exactly as it was. Why? I asked her once. Why does everything have to be exactly as it was? She did me over too. She didn’t restore me exactly, she created me according to some Texas-conceived image of the River Road gentry, a kind of gentleman planter without plantation, a composite, I came to understand, of Ashley Wilkes (himself a creature of another woman of course, an anemic poetic Georgia gent), Leslie Howard (another anemic poetic gent), plus Jeff Davis home from the wars and set up in style by another strong-minded woman at Beauvoir, parked out in a pigeonnier much like mine, plus Gregory Peck, gentle Southern lawyer, plus a bit of Clark Gable as Rhett. She even bought my clothes. She liked me to wear linen suits.

I went along agreeably, amused by her extraordinary Texas notion that we “aristocratic” folk were somehow all of a piece. Of course we were not, not even aristocratic, and since I never felt much of a piece myself, I’d as soon dress the part. I even found myself playing up to the role, pacing up and down, stopping now and then to make a legal note at my plantation desk in her Florentine-leather notepad, stopping at the cypress cupboard-turned-into-bar to pour a whiskey from crystal decanter into silver jigger, the way Southern gents do in the movies.

Did you know that the South and for all I know the entire U.S.A. is full of demonic women who, driven by as yet unnamed furies, are desperately restoring and preserving places, buildings? Women married to fond indulgent easygoing somewhat lapsed men like me, who would as soon do one thing as another as long as they can go fishing, hunting, drink a bit, horse around, watch the Dolphins and Jack Nicklaus on TV. So here’s this fellow like me who maybe had a moment of glory in his youth, in football, in Phi Beta Kappa, as Grand Dragon of his fraternity, and now is managing Auto-Lec or Quik-Stop and every night comes home to a museum such as not even George Washington slept in.

So she finished the house and we found ourselves at a loss. What to do? We did what other well-off thirty-five-year-old couples did: went skiing in Aspen, house-partying, fishing and drinking on the Gulf Coast, house-partying and drinking in Highlands.

But what to do then? What to do with time? Make love. Have a child. We did that. At least I thought we did that. But after she finished Belle Isle and named her child Siobhan, there was nothing to do. Siobhan was well looked after, especially when granddaddy Tex moved in with us.

I could see her problem. Christ, what was she going to do? What to do with that Texas energy and her passion for making things either over or of a piece. What did God do after he finished creation? Christ, she didn’t know how to rest. At least in Louisiana we knew how to take things easy. We could always drink.

That was when she revived her interest in the “performing arts” and went to Dallas-Arlington to study under Merlin.

Did I love her? Why are you always asking about love? Have you been crossed up too? Isn’t your God’s love enough for you? Margot’s love was enough for me. I loved her sexually in such a way that I could not not touch her. My happiness was being with her. My old saturninity vanished. I hugged and kissed her in the street, necked in the car like white trash in the daytime, felt her up under the table in restaurants, and laughed like a boy to see her blush and knock my hand away and, looking anxiously around, revert to her old Texasese: “Git away from here! What you think you doing, boy!”

There is no joy on this earth like falling in love with a woman and managing at the same time the trick of keeping just enough perspective to see her fall in love too, to see her begin to see you in a different way, to see her color change, eyes soften, her hand of itself reach for you. Your saints say, Yes but the love of God is even better, but Jesus how could this be so? Well? Your eyes go distant as if you were thinking of a time long ago. Does that mean that you are no longer a believer or that nowadays not even believers can understand such things? Doesn’t your own Jewish Bible say there is nothing under the sun like the way of a man with a maid?

And there is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.

Do you know what jealousy is? Jealousy is an alteration in the very shape of time itself. Time loses its structure. Time stretches out. She isn’t here. Where is she? Who is she with? There is so much time. The minutes and hours creep by. What is she doing? She could be doing anything. She was not here. Her not being here was like oxygen not being here. What am I going to do with the rest of the day? Something tightened in my chest.

Elgin came in with a clipboard and sat across my desk looking both wary and pleased. When he put on his black horn-rimmed glasses, his hand trembled slightly. He looked like a smart student facing an important examination. I noticed he was dressed unusually, in what I took to be his school clothes, neat belted-in-the-back jeans, white shirt, narrow black tie. Had it been a problem for him to decide how he would appear? as house servant? tour guide? private eye? smart student?

I had been sitting in my pigeonnier watching boys build a bonfire on the levee. They started before Thanksgiving, cutting willows in the batture to make twenty-foot-high tepees which burn all night Christmas eve, making a great flaming crescent the whole length of English Turn like the campfires of a sleeping army.

It was not Margot I was thinking about but time, what to do with time. Sober, free of smoke and nicotine for the first time in years, my body cells tingled, watchful and uneasy. What next? What’s coming up? My tongue was ready to taste, my muscles were ready to contract, my liver hummed away, my genitals prickled. Then I realized why I drank and smoked. It was a way of dealing with time. What to do with time? A fearful thing: a human body of ten billion cells ready to do any one of ten billion things. But what to do?

The empty tape was spinning past the tape head.

“Ahem.” Elgin cleared his throat. I gave a start. “What do you—”

“Oh. Is that the log you kept last night?”

“Yes, sir.” Then he had felt the need to take on some guise or other. But which? house servant? private eye?

“Why don’t you just read it, Elgin?”

That helped. Now he could prop clipboard against crossed knee, push his glasses up his nose with his thumb.

“One-forty a.m. Subjects left Oleander Room.” He looked up. “They stood by the vending machines talking for ten minutes.”

“They? Who were they?”

“Miss Lucy.” Miss Lucy? He had never called her that. I saw that he felt a need to put a distance between himself and this business (though he was also proud of what he had done). In his nervousness he had put the greatest distance he could think of: he had retreated to being an old-time servant.

“Go ahead.”

“One-fifty. Miss Lucy and Miss Margot to room 115, Miss Raine’s room.”

“Never mind the Misters and Misses.”

“Okay. Troy Dana to room 118, his room. Merlin to 226, Jacoby to 145.

“Two-twelve a.m. Miss Margot leave 115 and go to 226.” For Margot he still needed the Miss.

“Merlin’s room?”

“Yes, sir. Two-twenty-five. Troy Dana leave 118 and go to 115.”

“Raine’s room. That puts Troy, Lucy, and Raine in 115.”

“Yes, sir. Two-fifty-one a.m. Miss Margot leave” (leave not leaves: he was nervous) “226 and go to 145.”

“Jacoby’s room?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go on.”

“Five-oh-four a.m. Lucy leave 115 in a hurry, running like, go out. To her car.”

“Yes?”

“Five-fourteen. Troy Dana also leaves 115, goes to 118, his room.” Leaves. He was calmer.

“Okay.”

“Five-twenty-four. Miss Margot leaves 145, goes out. To her car. Oh, I forgot. Three-five. Jacoby went out for a glass of water.” He looked up. “I think Miss Margot was sick.”

“Yes?”

“That’s all.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes, sir. You told me to leave at daylight.” Feeling better, he shoved up the bridge of his glasses with his thumb. I could imagine his students years later, taking him off, doing a school skit imitating his doing this.

Ha. Maybe she was sick!

I remember thinking how odd Elgin was, switching back and forth from house nigger to young professor.

“Okay. That does it. Very good. Thanks, Elgin.”

Relieved, he swiftly got to his feet.

“No, wait.” I had already known what I was going to do. And how I was going to deal with it, time coming at me and ten billion cells tingling, waiting.

He sat down slowly. I picked up the telephone and called my cousin Laughlin at the Holiday Inn. Elgin, simply curious now, watched me.

“Lock, I need a favor.” I could ask. I had loaned him the money, Margot’s money, to build the motel.

“Sho, Lance. Just you ask.”

He was too quick and ingratiating. Gratitude, as well it might, made him uneasy. I could see him sitting at his desk: his clean short-sleeved shirt, neat receding hair turning brown-gray, Masonic ring on finger, hand on socks with clocks, short body just slightly fat, a simple shape like a balloon blown up just enough to smooth the wrinkles. He looked like the president of the Optimists Club, which in fact he was. A doomed optimist. The only difference between Laughlin and me was that Laughlin had not even had his youthful moment of glory. Instead he had had twenty or thirty jobs in the past twenty or thirty years, at each of which he had not exactly failed (for he was earnest and if he was stupid it was in some mysterious self-defeating way which not even he was aware of) but rather completed what he set out to do. He lost interest, the job ran out, the company went out of business, people stopped buying bicycles, sugar tripled in price and ruined his Nabisco distributorship. Now he answered too quickly. Two things made him nervous: one, that he owed me a favor; the other, that he was succeeding. Success terrified him.

“Just you ask, Lance,” he said, gaining confidence from my hesitation.

“I want you to close the motel for a few days.”

“What’s that again?” he asked quickly.

“Just say they’re going to cut your gas off temporarily as in fact they might. As you know, most of our gas has got to go to New England.”

“I know but — close the motel? Why?”

“I’ll pay you full occupancy even though you’re only half full. It should be for two or three days.”

“But tomorrow’s Tuesday.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Rotary.”

“I mean the rooms. Go ahead and have Rotary.”

“Why do you want to close the rooms?”

I fell silent. Four boys on the levee were tilting up a tall shorn willow like the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Elgin was watching me, the old Elgin now, big-eyed and unmindful of himself.

“I want all those film people out. They’re almost finished. If they leave there, they’ll have to get out.”

“Oh.” Oh, I see, he meant. I was counting on his misapprehension and let it stand. “I don’t blame you.”

“For what?”

He trod carefully. “For wanting to keep an eye on ’em. I’ve seen a lot of things in this business.” He’d managed a motel in the French Quarter for a year. “You talk about humbug! But—”

“But what?”

“As long as they don’t tear up the furniture or burn the beds or stink up the place with pot, I don’t care who does what to who. You wouldn’t believe some of the things — college kids are the worst.”

He was either stupid or tactful and I do believe it was the latter. We talked easily, deplored college kids and the vicissitudes of the motel business.

“Okay, Lock?”

“Let’s see. It’s three-thirty. Too late to close today. But I’ll put a notice in each box to be out by check-out time tomorrow.” He warmed up to it. “As a matter of fact, they’ve been talking about cutting off my gas. How do you like that! New York City is going to get our gas! And that means no heat or air conditioning in the rooms. Don’t worry about a thing.” For once, his mournful gratitude gave way to good cheer. It was as if he had repaid his loan. “I don’t even care. I’m changing to propane. Do you know what my gas bill was last month?”

“Thank you, Lock.”

Elgin watched me as I hung up. Something had given him leave to relax and be himself.

“Elgin, there are some other things you and only you can do for me.”

“I’ll do them.”

In my new freedom I remember thinking: If one knows what he wants to do, others will not only not stand in the way but will lend a hand from simple curiosity and amazement.

“Okay. You recall the other day we were speaking about the chimney hole and the dumbwaiter?”

“Yes.” All ears now.

“All right. Look.” Taking his log from the clipboard, I turned it over and began to draw a floor plan. “I’m making two assumptions. One is that they’ll move back into Belle Isle when they leave the motel tomorrow. There’s nowhere else to go.”

“Right.”

“Then I’m assuming they’ll move back into the same rooms at Belle Isle they had before.”

“Yes. They left their clothes there.”

“Merlin here on one side of the chimney, Jacoby here on the other. But Margot’s and Lucy’s, Dana’s and Raine’s rooms are across the hall. That presents a technical problem.”

“Technical problem?”

“Tell me something, Elgin. How would you like to make a movie?”

“Movie? What kind of movie?”

“A new kind of cinéma vérité.” I picked up the pencil. “Here’s where you can help me. There are a few technical problems.”

Christ, here’s my discovery. You have got hold of the wrong absolutes and infinities. God as absolute? God as infinity? I don’t even understand the words. I’ll tell you what’s absolute and infinite. Loving a woman. But how would you know? You see, your church knows what it’s doing: rule out one absolute so you have to look for another.

Do you know what it’s like to be a self-centered not unhappy man who leads a tolerable finite life, works, eats, drinks, hunts, sleeps, then one fine day discovers that the great starry heavens have opened to him and that his heart is bursting with it. It? She. Her. Woman. Not a category, not a sex, not one of two sexes, a human female creature, but an infinity. . What else is infinity but a woman become meat and drink to you, life and your heart’s own music, the air you breathe? Just to be near her is to live and have your soul’s own self. Just to open your mouth on the skin of her back. What joy just to wake up with her beside you in the morning. I didn’t know there was such happiness.

But there is the dark converse: not having her is not breathing. I’m not kidding: I couldn’t get my breath without her.

What else is man made for but this? I can see you agree about love but you look somewhat ironic. Are we talking about two different things? In any case, there’s a catch. Love is infinite happiness. Losing it is infinite unhappiness.

So far so good, you say, somewhat ironically, I notice. A man falls in love with a lovely lusty woman, so what else is new? But can you imagine what it’s like to love a lovely lustful woman who lusts but not for you?

Quite a discovery.

The truth is, it never crossed my mind in my entire sweet Southern life that there was such a thing as a lustful woman. Another infinite imponderable. Infinitely appalling. What hath God wrought?

On the other hand, why should not a woman, who is after all a creature like any other, be lustful? Yet to me, the sight of a lustful woman was as incredible as a fire-breathing dragon turning up at the Rotary Club.

What I really mean of course was that what horrified me was the discovery of the possibility that she might lust for someone not me.

But of course I had to make sure of it. Love and lust should not be a matter of speculation.

Margot, it turned out, was indeed sick the morning after Elgin’s stakeout. Pale and feverish.

Then perhaps she had simply got sick and been cared for by Merlin and Jacoby. Why is it so hard to make certain of a simple thing?

Margot was sick! Hurray.

Yes, but I was not Siobhan’s father and Merlin could be and Merlin was here.

My God, why was I torturing myself?

“When did it come on, Margot?” I asked her, going to her room after breakfast.

“God, I damned near fainted during the rushes. I think I did faint later. Out cold. I just barely managed to drag myself home.”

Can one ever be sure of anything? Did my mother go for innocent joyrides with Uncle Harry, take the air, and see the sights as they said, or did they take the lap robe and head for the woods or a tourist cabin, one of those little pre-motel miniature houses set up on four cinderblocks with a bed, linoleum, gas heater, and tin shower, the essentials.

What does that sorrowful look of yours mean? And what if they did, would it be so bad, is that what you mean? What are you mourning? Them? Me? Us?

You know the main difference between you and me? With you everything seems to get dissolved in a kind of sorrowful solution. Poor weak mankind! The trouble is that in your old tolerant Catholic world-weariness, you lose all distinctions. Love everything. Yes, but at midnight all cats are black, so what difference does anything make? It does make a difference? What? You opened your mouth and then thought better of it—

But don’t you see. I had to find out. There I was in early middle age and I couldn’t answer the most fundamental question of all. What question? This: Are people as nice as they make out and in fact appear to be, or is it all buggery once the door is closed?

So I meant to find out once and for all. There is something worse than knowing the worst. It is not knowing.

In the back of my mind all along was the sensation I had when I opened my father’s sock drawer and found the ten thousand dollars under the argyles my mother, nice lady that she was, had knitted for him, honorable man that he was.

One has to know. There are worse things than bad news.