Lancelot

6

IT WAS LUNCHTIME when my daughter Lucy came down for breakfast in quilted housecoat, face voluptuous, sleepy-eyed, slightly puffy.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” I asked her, remembering it was Tuesday.

“I’m not going back to school.” Her pale heavy face slanted sullenly over her food, eyes blinking regularly. Was she crying?

“Why not?”

“I’ve got a job.”

“Where?”

“With Raine.”

“Doing what?”

“I’m going to be her social and recording secretary.”

“Jesus, what’s that?”

“Daddy, they are the most wonderful people in the world.”

“They?”

“She and Troy. They are the only people I’ve ever known who are completely free.”

“Free?”

“Free to make their own lives.” Lucy looked up at last.

How little we know our own children! I think I had not looked at her in years. How did I size her up, this little stranger? She was not like her mother. The years would not treat her well. At sixteen she was at her prime; later her face would get heavy in the morning. She was like a child whom voluptuousness had overtaken unawares. By the time she becomes fully aware of it, she will have run to fat. Her own chemistry had played a trick on her and her face was heavy with it. This innocent voluptuousness was the sort — and here I shocked myself — to inspire lewdness in strangers.

“We sat up all night in the motel room talking.”

Then perhaps life was as innocent as that: they sat up all night talking. Margot sick and Lucy talking. Why not?

“About what?”

“Everything. Raine, you know, is deep into I.P.D. Did you know she was president of the national association?”

“No.”

“My job will really be to be recording secretary for I.P.D.”

“What will you learn from that?”

“I’ve learned more in the last three weeks than I ever learned in my life.”

“What?”

“About myself. What makes me tick. For example, about the lower centers.”

“The what?”

“The four lower centers. As opposed to the three higher, consciousness, mind, spirit.”

“You mean you want to go back to California with Raine?”

“I’m going to live with Troy and Raine.”

“I didn’t know they were married.”

“They’re not. And I’m glad they’re not. If they were married, I’d be like a daughter or something. This way we’re equals, a threesome, one for all, all for one.”

Is all niceness then or is all buggery? How can a man be forty-five years old and still not know whether all is niceness or buggery? How does one know for sure?

“Have you spoken to your mother? You’ll have to have our permission, you know.”

“She’s all for it. At least she said so this morning. I hope she’s not out of her mind — she said she had a 103-degree fever.”

Then she was sick and all is niceness and not buggery.

“You mean you want to live with Troy and Raine?”

“Yes. Do you want to see their house, rather Raine’s house? Isn’t that neat?”

From her pocket she took out photos of Raine and of the house, the first inscribed with writing: I could only read To my little—Little what? I couldn’t make it out. The other showed an English beam-in-plaster mansion and some California plants trimmed to shapes, spheres and rhomboids. It looked like the sort of place where Philip Marlowe called on a rich client and insulted the butler.

“Look at what Raine gave me.”

Opening her housecoat, she showed me a heavy gold cross nestled in the dusky cleft of her young breasts.

“She’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever known.”

She seemed to be. Everyone seemed wonderful. All the town folk thought the movie people wonderful. And in fact they seemed to be.

I think I see now what I am doing. I am reliving with you my quest. That’s the only way I can bear to think about it. Something went wrong. If you listen I think I can figure out what it was.

It was a quest all right and a very peculiar one. But peculiar times require peculiar quests.

We’ve spoken of the Knights of the Holy Grail. Percival. Do you know what I was? The Knight of the Unholy Grail.

In times like these when everyone is wonderful, what is needed is a quest for evil.

You should be interested! Such a quest serves God’s cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God. If you had ten thousand Albert Schweitzers giving their lives for their fellow men, do you think anyone would have a second thought about God?

Or suppose the Lowell Professor of Religion at Harvard should actually find the Holy Grail, dig it up in an Israeli wadi, properly authenticate it, carbon date it, and present it to the Metropolitan Museum. Millions of visitors! I would be as curious as the next person and would stand in line for hours to see it. But what difference would it make in the end? People would be interested for a while, yes. This is an age of interest.

But suppose you could show me one “sin,” one pure act of malevolence. A different cup of tea! That would bring matters to a screeching halt. But we have plenty of evil around you say. What about Hitler, the gas ovens and so forth? What about them? As everyone knows and says, Hitler was a madman. And it seems nobody else was responsible. Everyone was following orders. It is even possible that there was no such order, that it was all a bureaucratic mistake.

Show me a single “sin.”

One hundred and twenty thousand dead at Hiroshima? Where was the evil of that? Was Harry Truman evil? As for the pilot and bombardier, they were by all accounts wonderful fellows, good fathers and family men.

“Evil” is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone’s either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil.

God may be absent, but what if one should find the devil? Do you think I wouldn’t be pleased to meet the devil? Ha, ha. I’d shake his hand like a long-lost friend.

The mark of the age is that terrible things happen but there is no “evil” involved. People are either crazy, miserable, or wonderful, so where does the “evil” come in?

There I was forty-five years old and I didn’t know whether there was “evil” in the world.

A small corollary to the above: Is evil to be sought in violence or in sexual behavior? Or is all violence bad and all sexual behavior good, or as Jacoby and Merlin would say, life-enhancing?

If one is looking for evil, why not study war or child-battering? Could anything be more evil? Yet, as everyone knows, mothers and fathers who beat and kill their children have psychological problems and are as bad off as the children. It has been proved that every battered child has battered parents, battered grandparents, and so on. No one is to blame.

As for war, the only time members of my family have ever been happy, brave, successful, was in time of war. What’s wrong with war?

Look across the street. Do you see that girl’s Volkswagen’s bumper sticker: Make Love Not War. That is certainly the motto of the age. Is anything wrong with it?

Yes. Could it be possible that since the greatest good is to be found in love, so is the greatest evil. Evil, sin, if it exists, must be incommensurate with anything else. Didn’t one of your saints say that the entire universe in all its goodness is not worth the cost of a single sin? Sin is incommensurate, right? There is only one kind of behavior which is incommensurate with anything whatever, in both its infinite good and its infinite evil. That is sexual behavior. The orgasm is the only earthly infinity. Therefore it is either an infinite good or an infinite evil.

My quest was for a true sin — was there such a thing? Sexual sin was the unholy grail I sought.

It is possible of course that there is no such thing and that a true sin, like the Grail, probably does not exist.

Yet I had the feeling I was on to something, perhaps for the first time in my life. Or at least for twenty years. I was like Robinson Crusoe seeing a footprint on his island after twenty years: Not a footprint but my daughter’s blood type. Aha, there is something going on!

So overnight I became sober, clear-eyed, clean, fit, alert, watchful as a tiger at a water hole.

Something was stirring. So Sir Lancelot set out, looking for something rarer than the Grail. A sin.

“Elgin, how would you like to make a movie?”

Elgin smiled. “Merlin axed me already.”

“To be in one. I’m asking about making a movie, not Merlin’s. Mine. I’m going to make a movie.”

“You are?”

“And you’re going to help me.”

“I am?”

“Elgin, listen.” I walked around the plantation desk and stood hands in pockets looking down at him. He sat perfectly symmetrical, arms resting at an angle across chair arms, fingers laced, gazing straight ahead, a slight smile on his lips. “I’m asking a favor of you. I need someone to help me and only you can do it. There are two reasons for this. One is that only you have the technical ability to help me. The other is that you are one of the two or three people in the world I trust. The others are probably your mother and father. I must tell you that it is a large favor because you will be doing it without knowing why. Although what I’m asking you to do is not illegal, it is just as well you don’t know the reasons. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“Okay.” Still avoiding my eye, he answered immediately. It was as if he already knew what I wanted.

“Here’s the technical problem. To tell you the truth, I don’t know whether it can be solved. Certainly I have no idea of how to go about it.” I took out my floor plan of Belle Isle’s second story. “You see these five rooms? Margot’s and Raine’s on one side of the hall, separated by the chimney and dumb-waiter. On the other side of the hall are these three rooms, Troy Dana’s here. Merlin’s here, Janos Jacoby’s here. They’ll be moving back to the house tomorrow as I had anticipated.”

Elgin’s eyelids flickered once, when I mentioned Margot’s name. Otherwise his expression did not change.

Elgin didn’t move, but his eyes went out of focus.

“Now here’s what I want. I want a hidden camera mounted in each room and the events which occur in the room between midnight and five o’clock recorded. For one, perhaps two nights. Three nights at the most.”

“No way,” he said at last.

But even as he said it, shaking his head and smiling, he was casting about in his mind — happily. Happy the man who can live with problems! It was this I had counted on of course, that the problem, its sheer impossibility, would engage him immediately so that he would not think two seconds about what I was asking him to do.

Even as he smiled and shook his head, he was casting about. It was the challenge of the thing. He was like a mountain climber, pitoned, rappeled, looking straight up a sheer cliff. It couldn’t be climbed. On the other hand, perhaps—

“No way.” He repeated the impossibility, savored it.

“Why not?”

“At least three reasons. Not enough light. Camera noise. And no camera will run five hours.”

“I see.” I waited, watching him thumb his glasses up his nose bridge, scratch his head.

An odd thought: I remember thinking at the time that nothing really changes, not even Elgin going from pickaninny to M.I.T. smart boy. For you see, even in doing that and not in casting about for the technical solution, he was still in a sense “my nigger”; and my watching him, waiting for him, was piece and part of the old way we had of ascribing wondrous powers to “them,” if they were “ours.” Don’t you remember how my grandfather used to say of old Fluker, Ellis’s father, that with Fluker along on a quail hunt you didn’t need bird dogs, that Fluker knew where the birds were?

That was part of it sure enough — not that Elgin was like a bird dog but that in being smart and through some special dispensation, perhaps by reason of our very need and helplessness, we could depend on them for anything, not just to smell out quail, but to be M.I.T. smart, smarter than we, Jew-smart, no, smarter than Jews. I could hear my grandfather: I’ll put that Elgin up against a Jew anytime, any Jew. Go pick your Jew.

“Does it have to be a film?” Elgin looked up at me; his tongue went sideways. I knew he had thought of something.

“What else—”

“How about a tape?”

“I want sight not sound.”

“Videotape.”

“How does that work?”

“Just like the closed-circuit TV camera you see in stores. Only—”

“Only?”

“Okay, look. How about this?” He swung round to the desk, picked up my pencil. His black eyes danced. It had come to him, the solution! “We use five mini-compact cameras here and here.” He put X’s in the dumbwaiter outlets to Margot’s and Raine’s rooms.

“I thought of that. But what about the three across the hall?”

“We’ll use the A/C vents.”

“The air conditioning?”

“Sure. We’ll use mini-compacts with twenty-five millimeter lenses — small enough to see through a slot in the grill.”

“What about camera noise?”

“No noise. No film. It’s a TV camera.”

“What about the dark?”

“We’ll use a Vidicon pickup tube, a Philips two-stage light intensifier — you know, it works on the fiber-optics principle, can pick up a single quantum of light.”

“Then we’ll need some light.”

“Moonlight will help.”

I looked at my feed-store calendar. “There’s a half moon.”

He picked up his glasses. “I might use infrared.”

“Good.”

“All I need is a control room. That could be anywhere.”

“How about my father’s library, here?”

“Don’t Mr. Tex and Siobhan use that? We have to have a completely undisturbed place.”

“All I have to do is move the TV set. I’ll put it in Siobhan’s room here.”

“That’s fine. I could bring in lead-in cables from the dumbwaiter and the A/C ducts by way of the third floor.”

“And what will you be doing in there?”

“Recording five tapes. I’ll need a Conrac monitor.”

“How long will it take you to rig up all that?”

“Well, I’ll have to go to New Orleans to get the equipment.” He looked at his watch. “Tomorrow. Then it would take the next day to rig it — if nobody was around.”

“They won’t be. They’re shooting in town the next two days. A courthouse scene and a love scene at the library.”

“Okay. I guess the best we can do is day-after-tomorrow night — and that’s only if everything goes well and I can get the equipment. But I’m sure I can get it.”

“I hope so. Because they’ll be shooting at Belle Isle in two or three days. Then it will be too late.”

“We can do it. All you got to do is clear the house tomorrow and the day after and clear the library at night.”

“How much will all that stuff cost?”

“The light intensifier is expensive, maybe four thousand. The whole works shouldn’t run over eight or ten at the outside.”

“Ten thousand,” I said. “I have that in the house account. I think I’d better get cash for you. The bank opens at nine. You could be on your way by nine-thirty.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Then what will you end up with?”

“Five tapes. Something like this.” He picked up an eight-track cartridge of Beethoven’s last quartets. During the last months I found that I could be moderately happy if I simultaneously (1) drank, (2) read Raymond Chandler, and (3) listened to Beethoven.

“There’s only one problem,” said Elgin, turning the tape over and over.

“What’s that?”

“Time. Not even this will record five hours. Ah.” He had it, the solution. For him now in a kind of exaltation of inventiveness, it was enough to put the problem into words. Saying it was solving it. He even snapped his fingers.

“We’ll have to use the new Subiru motion activator.”

“What is that?” In the very offhandedness of his voice I could catch the excitement, the exhilaration of his knowledge and skill.

He shrugged. “You know, the voice-activated sound tape recorder? It only goes on when there is a noise.”

“Like the President had?”

“Yeah.” He was too happy to notice irony. “Same principle. Transferred to light. The tape only moves when something or someone in front of the camera moves.”

“Something or someone. You mean it wouldn’t just record a sleeping person?”

“Only when he or she turned over. All he got to do is move — or talk.”

When something or someone moved. Yes, that was it. That was what I wanted. Who moved, toward whom, with whom.

It was necessary to visit the set, something I never did, in order to see how long the shooting would take and to warn Elgin should my houseguests decide to return to Belle Isle early. He must have time to arrange his own “set,” place and wire his cameras.

I needn’t have worried. They spent all day on one short scene between Margot and Dana. Fifteen or twenty times he had her up against the library stacks performing “simulated intercourse.” He was filmed from the rear doing something to Margot quickly and easily. He was clothed.

Merlin was surprised to see me, but pleasant and talkative as usual. I told him I had come to make him welcome at Belle Isle and to be sure they had removed from the motel. Though the danger from the hurricane was slight, the motel was built in a swamp and could be flooded.

“You’re a beautiful guy!” Merlin came close and took my arm. He had a way of making any encounter between us exclude the others. His blue eyes were fond; the white fiber made the iris spin with dizzy affection. “How extraordinary that a real hurricane should be approaching the same time as our make-believe hurricane. Actually though, this scene has nothing to do with the hurricane.”

“I want to hear the zipper,” Janos Jacoby told Dana.

The set was the small public library in town. Town folk watched, standing, arms folded, sitting on aluminum chairs, on the sidewalk, on the grass, in the doorway. Inside, the library was a mess; it looked as if the hurricane had already hit, everything moved out of the way to shoot Margot and Dana in the stacks. The blue-white lights were brighter and hotter than the sun outside. Heavy cables snaked over the trodden grass like a carnival ground. Between shots Dana zipped his pants, fell back, and cleaned his nails, listened inattentively to Jacoby. As the librarian in the movie, Margot wore glasses around her neck, white blouse, cashmere cardigan, sleeves pushed up. She was not at ease. Her face was cheeky and her movements wooden. She was. I saw instantly, not a good actress. What she was doing was not acting, that is, imitating someone else, but acting like an actress imitating-someone-else. She was once removed from acting.

Dana was something to see: barefoot, tight jeans with silver conch belt, some kind of pullover homespun shirt, necklace with single jade stone, perfect helmet of yellow hair, perfect regular features, perfect straight brows flaring like wings. He moved well and had grace. He was an idiot but he had grace. He was a blank space filled in by somebody else’s idea. He was a good actor. His eyes had somehow been made up so they seemed to gather light and glow of themselves. The town folk gaped at him as if he were another species. Perhaps he was. Perhaps somewhere on the golden sands of California had come into being a new breed of perfect creatures, young and golden.

Margot couldn’t see me. The lights were too bright.

“This is a very short scene but a very critical one,” Merlin explained. “It is the sexual liberation of Sarah.”

“Sexual liberation?”

“Yeah. You remember. Dana is the stranger who wanders into town from nowhere and is so extraordinarily gifted — everyone is immediately aware of it. Thank God for the movies. Dana gifted? He barely had sense not to drown when he fell off his surfboard in Beach Blanket Bingo. But look at him, isn’t he something? We can create him from the beginning like a doll. I created Dana — Dana himself is nothing, a perfect cipher. This character, this stranger is immediately perceived by everybody as somehow different — for one thing his eyes, there’s an inner light, he’s a creature of light. Look at him. His normal temperature is around 101. He actually glows. Most important, he is free. Everybody else is hung up — as in fact everybody is, you’re hung up, I’m hung up. Right? Sarah is a Joanne Woodward type — though Margot is actually a bit too young and good-looking — but she has never known what it is to be a woman. You know. Her husband, Lipscomb, is out of it too. He sits wringing his hands while the plantation goes to pot. She holds things together, makes a pittance at the library. He’s hung up. Everyone is hung up. The sharecroppers, black and white, are hung up in poverty and ignorance. The townies are hung up in bigotry and so forth. Not only is the stranger free, he is also able to free others. There is the sense about him of having come from far away, perhaps the East, perhaps farther. Perhaps he is a god. At least he is a kind of Christ type.

“He fulfills people. He fulfills the longing of the sharecroppers for their own land — he discovers that Raine’s, Ella’s, family owns the land. He reconciles black and white — who discover their own common humanity during the hurricane. He even gets to the sheriff (God, I wish we could have got Pat Hingle), who despite himself is tremendously moved by this glowing nonviolent vibrant creature — actually there’s a strong hint here of Southern sheriff homosexuality, right? He almost reaches Lipscomb, who has lost his ties with the land, nature, his own sexuality. He does reach Sarah. He walks into the library and while her mouth falls open, he simply goes to the bookshelf, takes down the Rig-Veda, and reads the great passage beginning: ‘Desire entered the One in the beginning.’ Then, again without saying a word, he takes her hand and leads her back into the stacks, where he takes her standing against the old musty books — Thackeray and Dickens and so forth — representing the drying up of Western juices. There’s a lovely tight shot of her face while she’s making love against a dusty set of the Waverley novels. Great? The stranger is the life-giving principle, the books are dead, everyone is dead, Thackeray is dead. Scott is dead, the town is dead, Lipscomb is dead, she is dead, or rather she has never lived. So what we are trying to get across is that it is not just screwing, though there is nothing wrong with that either, but a kind of sacrament and celebration of life. He could be a high priest of Mithras. You see what we’re getting at?”

Something went wrong. Jacoby called for an Arriflex hand-held camera and his assistant Lionel couldn’t locate it. Jacoby came over to talk to Merlin. More or less automatically I held out my hand — not that I wanted to shake hands with him, but we know in the South that the real purpose of manners is to make life easier for everyone, easier both to keep to oneself and to avoid the uneasy commerce of offense and even insult. Either one shakes hands with someone or one ignores him or one kills him. What else is there? Jacoby ignored me. His bemused eye looked through me and past me. I do believe that he did not insult me but rather did not see me. In his absorption I was part of the town decor, one of them. Merlin noticed the oversight and was embarrassed, cleared his throat, did not know what to do. There’s the function of manners: that no one will not know what to do.

I rescued Merlin by asking him how long they were going to work today. “Oh, late! Late!” cried Merlin cordially. “And thanks so much for putting us up”—looking to Jacoby to echo thanks but Jacoby only nodded vaguely. I escaped and went out through the back, the office of the librarian.

Raine and Lucy and Miss Maude, the librarian, were there. Raine kissed me with every appearance of pleasure — what is she? actress? flirt? wanton? nice affectionate girl? Lucy followed suit somewhat absentmindedly. She was so frantic in her crush on Raine that she hardly noticed me.

“Isn’t it exciting!” said Raine, putting her hands on my shoulders, rocking me a little, brushing knees. One knee came between my knees.

“What?”

“The hurricane!”

“I don’t think it’ll get here.”

“But the light! Haven’t you noticed the peculiar yellow light and the sinister quietness about things? Isn’t this usually true of hurricanes?”

“I suppose. I hadn’t really noticed.”

“I was telling Lucy that there is more than coincidence involved here.”

“How’s that?”

“How could such a coincidence happen, that at the very time we are making a film about a hurricane, a real hurricane should come?”

“Well, it could. This is hurricane season.”

“What are the mathematical chances involved? One in a million? There is more than weather involved. There is more than light involved. I feel the convergence of all our separate lines of force. Can’t you feel something changed in the air between all of us?”

“Well—”

“I do, Raine!” cried Lucy, hugging Raine’s arm.

Raine, color high in her cheek, spoke to me with her head ducked, as flirtatiously as Siobhan. Was this her way of being shy about her mystical convictions?

“There’s a force field around all of us, waxing and waning,” said Raine absently, suddenly waning herself, losing interest. She spoke a little more, but inattentively.

“Maybe you’re right, Raine.” I could never figure out the enthusiasm of movie folk. It was as if they were possessed fitfully by demons, but demons of a very low order to whom one needn’t pay strict attention.

Miss Maude, like Lucy, fixed on Raine, eyes glistening.

Dana came moseying in, thumbs hooked in his jeans. Miss Maude’s eyes bulged. He was something to see. Maybe he was the new sunlit god come to save this sad town. But when, ignoring us, he began to talk to Raine, it was about his — investments! Bad news from London, where he had bought a pub which made money but the government took 90 percent of it! “Christ, if I had just listened to Bob about Cayman,” and so forth — fretting! eyes crossed with worry about alimony and taxes, and all at once you saw that he was an optical illusion, a trick, that his beauty was not only accidental and that he had no part in it but that he didn’t even credit himself with it. He was like a hound dog wearing a diamond necklace.

Miss Maude was suddenly possessed by a demon all her own. Imploringly, almost tearfully, eyes glistening, she offered Raine her house for the scene between Lipscomb the decadent planter and his aunt, a strong aristocratic type (“Christ, can’t you see Ouspenskaya doing her!” said Merlin), who tells him his true strength comes from the land. “You always have the land! The land is eternal!” and so forth. Miss Maude seemed to know all about the movie.

“Thank you, Maude,” said Raine, giving her a hug. “I’ll tell Jan and Bob.” Raine, I saw, was in a kind of ecstasy of benevolence. It pleased her to be nice to Miss Maude. Raine’s face shone like a saint’s or like Ingrid Bergman’s. Was it the hurricane which excited her or the exaltation of being a movie star and confirming her stardom in the faces of ordinary folk?

I blinked. All at once Miss Maude, whom I had known all my life or thought I knew, went off her rocker. Or she had been off her rocker for forty years and now at last came to herself. In fact she said so.

Her face suddenly wrinkled up like a prune, her eyes glittered with tears. At first I thought she was crying, but it was not grief, it was happiness, gratitude. She twisted a handkerchief in her hands.

“I just can’t tell you what it means to me,” said Miss Maude, pumping her tired hands back and forth.

“Raine got Jan to give Miss Maude a walk-on in the library scene,” explained Lucy.

“Is there any way I can tell you?” implored Miss Maude, coming ever closer to Raine, wringing her hands, frantic with an emotion not even she could name.

“You did a good job,” said Raine, backing off, getting a little more than she had bargained for. “You’re a beautiful person. Maude.”

“Oh, Raine, Raine, Raine,” said Maude and actually threw back her head and closed her eyes.

I looked at Maude in astonishment. Had everybody in this town gone nuts or was I missing something? The special nuttiness of the movie people I was used to, but the town had gone nuts. Town folk, not just Maude, acted as if they lived out their entire lives in a dim charade, a shadow-play in which they were the shadows, and now all at once to have appear miraculously in their midst these resplendent larger-than-life beings. She, Maude, couldn’t get over it: not only had they turned up in her library, burnishing the dim shelves with their golden light; she had for a moment been one of them!

Presently Mrs. Robichaux, a dentist’s wife, whom all these years I had taken to be a mild comely content little body, showed up from nowhere and told Raine she would do anything, anything, for the company: “even carry klieg lights!”

The world had gone crazy, said the crazy man in his cell. What was nutty was that the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world but the real world thought that its reality could only be found in the illusions. Two sets of maniacs.

Somehow they had dropped the ball between them.

Lionel came in close with the Arriflex camera saddled on his shoulder. Again Dana moved against Margot. He looked straight into her eyes, lazily and with no difficulty. Margot looked back with difficulty. Three lights were reflected in her pupil.

Jacoby held both of them, his bent hands on their shoulders, eyes fixed on the floor, like a referee talking to boxers.

“Dear,” he said to Margot, “this time let’s try it this way. I want your legs wrapped around him.”

He’s not from Poland, I thought. He’d lost his accent again.

“How?” asked Margot faintly.

“How? Christ, just do it. He’ll help. He’s going to grab your ass and hold you off the floor. Don’t worry.”

“All right.”

“And when you say your one line: ‘You will be gentle with me, won’t you?’ I want to hear both fear and tenderness. Can you manage that, dear?”

“I’ll try.”

“Yeah, all right. You ready? Remember, Dana, I want to hear the zipper. It’s important.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Merlin,” I asked, “what happens to, ah, Lipscomb in the end?”

Merlin shrugged. “Just what you might suppose. He is almost reached, first by the stranger, then by his own aunt. But in the end he slips away from both. He gently subsides into booze and Chopin. Sarah opts for life, he for death. The stranger is immolated by a town mob who think they hate him but really hate the life forces in themselves that he stirs. He is the new Christ, of course.”

I walked back to Belle Isle on the levee. Sure enough, the air had got heavy and still. Yet far above, black clouds were racing, fleeing north of their own accord like the blackbirds which rose from the swamp disquieted. A yellow light filled the space between earth and clouds as if the Christmas bonfires were already burning.

I couldn’t stand it. I still can’t stand it. I can’t stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age. What is more, I won’t. That was my discovery: that I didn’t have to.

If you were right, I could stand it. If your Christ were king and all that stuff you believe — Christ, do you still believe it? — were true, I could stand it. But you don’t even believe it yourself, do you? All you can think about is that girl on the levee. No wonder you don’t have time to pray for the dead. All you can think about is getting that girl over the levee into the willows.

No? But if what you once believed were true, I could stand the way things are.

Or if my great-great-grandfather were right, I could live with that. Do you know what he did? He had a duel! Not a gentlemanly affaire d’honneur under the Audubon oaks in New Orleans, but a fight to the death with fists and knives just like Jim Bowie, in fact on the same sand bar. He had won a lot of money in a poker game in Alexandria. The heavy loser took it hard and began muttering about cheating. That was bad enough. But he made a mistake. He mentioned my kinsman’s mother’s name. She was a d’Arbouche from New Roads. Now my kinsman was a swarthy man; he looked like Jean Lafitte. “What’s that you said?” he asked the fellow, who then said something like, “You got the right name all right.” “And how is that?” asked my ancestor pleasantly. “Well, it’s d’Arbouche, isn’t it, or is it Tarbrouche?” Which was to say that my ancestor had a touch of the tarbrush which was in turn to say that his mother, a very white Creole lady, had had sexual relations with a Negro, and offhand it is harder to say which was the deadlier insult: that she had had sexual relations with a man other than her husband, or that the man was a Negro. “I see,” said my ancestor. “Well, I’ll tell you what I propose. You and I will meet in four hours, which is dawn, on the Vidalia sand bar, which is outside the jurisdiction of both Louisiana and Mississippi. With one Bowie knife apiece. No seconds.” They met. Seconds did come but were scared and hid in the willows. They fought. My ancestor killed his man, was badly cut on the arms and face, but managed to grab the fellow, turn him around, and cut his throat from ear to ear. Then he sent for an ax, beheaded, dismembered, and quartered the body, and fed it to the catfishes. He washed himself in the river, bound his wounds, and he and his friends rowed over to Natchez-under-the-Hill and ate a hearty breakfast.

I could live that way, crude as it was, though I do not think men should butcher each other like animals. But it is at least a way to live. One knows where one stands and what one can do. Even defeat is better than not knowing.

Or I could live your way if it were true.

What I can’t stand is the way things are now. Furthermore, I will not stand for it.

Stand for what, you ask? Well, for that, to give an insignificant example. What you’re looking at. You see the movie poster across the street? The 69ers? Man and woman yin-yanged, fellatioed, cunnilinged on the corner of Felicity and Annunciation Streets? What would I do about it? Quite simply it would be removed.

Come here, Percival, I want to tell you something. It is not a confession but a secret. It is not a sin because I do not know what a sin is. I understand that before you can sin, you must know what sin is — Bless me, Father, for I have done something which I don’t understand. I know what a trespass or an injury or an insult is — something to be set right. So I’m telling you this and, confession or not, I consider you bound by the seal of friendship if not the confessional.

Come over here. Never mind the window. Look at me. We’ve been through a great deal together: school, war, talk, whoring, football, nice girls, hot girls, so since you understand me and my past — if you don’t, nobody does — I’m going to tell you my plans for the future. There is going to be a new order of things and I shall be part of it. Don’t confuse it with anything you’ve heard of before. Certainly not with your Holy Name Society or Concerned Christians Against Smut. This has nothing to do with Christ or boycotts. Don’t confuse it with the Nazis. They were stupid. If in fact there was a need to clean up the Weimar Republic and if in fact they did in part, they screwed everything up by getting off on the Jews. What stupidity! The Jews were not to blame. The Nazis were clods, thugs. What they should have done was invite the Jews. Half the Jews would have joined them — just as half the Catholics did. Don’t confuse it with the Klan, those poor ignorant bastards. Blacks, Jews, Catholics — they are all irrelevant; blaming them only confuses the issue. We’ll invite them and you. Don’t confuse it with Southern white trash Wallace politics. It’s got nothing to do with politics.

It is none of these things. What is it then?

It is simply this: a conviction and a freedom. The conviction: I will not tolerate this age. The freedom: the freedom to act on my conviction. And I will act. No one else has both the conviction and the freedom. Many agree with me, have the conviction, but will not act. Some act. assassinate, bomb, burn, etc., but they are the crazies. Crazy acts by crazy people. But what if one, sober, reasonable, and honorable man should act, and act with perfect sobriety, reason, and honor? Then you have the beginning of a new age. We shall start a new order of things.

We? Who are we? We will not even be a secret society as you know such things. Its members will know each other without signs or passwords. No speeches, rallies, political parties. There will be no need of such things. One man will act. Another man will act. We will know each other as gentlemen used to know each other — no, not gentlemen in the old sense — I’m not talking about social classes. I’m talking about something held in common by men, Gentile, Jew, Greek, Roman, slave, freeman, black, white, and so recognized between them: a stern code, a gentleness toward women and an intolerance of swinishness, a counsel kept, and above all a readiness to act, and act alone if necessary — there’s the essential ingredient — because as of this moment not one in 200 million Americans is ready to act from perfect sobriety and freedom. If one man is free to act alone, you don’t need a society. How will we know each other? The same way General Lee and General Forrest would know each other at a convention of used-car dealers on Bourbon Street: Lee a gentleman in the old sense. Forrest not, but in this generation of vipers they would recognize each other instantly.

You have your Sacred Heart. We have Lee. We are the Third Revolution. The First Revolution in 1776 against the stupid British succeeded. The Second Revolution in 1861 against the money-grubbing North failed — as it should have because we got stuck with the Negro thing and it was our fault. The Third Revolution will succeed. What is the Third Revolution? You’ll see.

I cannot tolerate this age. And I will not. I might have tolerated you and your Catholic Church, and even joined it, if you had remained true to yourself. Now you’re part of the age. You’ve the same fleas as the dogs you’ve lain down with. I would have felt at home at Mont-Saint-Michel, the Mount of the Archangel with the flaming sword, or with Richard Coeur de Lion at Acre. They believed in a God who said he came not to bring peace but the sword. Make love not war? I’ll take war rather than what this age calls love. Which is a better world, this cocksucking cuntlapping assholelicking fornicating Happyland U.S.A. or a Roman legion under Marcus Aurelius Antoninus? Which is worse, to die with T. J. Jackson at Chancellorsville or live with Johnny Carson in Burbank?

Yes, I’ll be out of here in a month or two. What do we intend to do, you ask? We? I can only speak for me. Others will then do likewise. But let me give you an example from my future life. Yes! I may be uncertain about the past, about what happened — it’s all confused, I’d rather not think about it — but I know what the future and the new order and my life will be like. The new order will not be based on Catholicism or Communism or fascism or liberalism or capitalism or any ism at all, but simply on that stem rectitude valued by the new breed and marked by the violence which will attend its breach. We will not tolerate this age. Don’t speak to me of Christian love. Whatever came of it? I’ll tell you what came of it. It got mouthed off on the radio and TV from the pulpit and that was the end of it. The Jews knew better. Billy Graham lay down with Nixon and got up with a different set of fleas, but the Jewish prophets lived in deserts and wildernesses and had no part with corrupt kings. I’ll prophesy: This country is going to turn into a desert and it won’t be a bad thing. Thirst and hunger are better than jungle rot. We will begin in the Wilderness where Lee lost. Deserts are clean places. Corpses turn quickly into simply pure chemicals.

Then how shall we live if not with Christian love? One will work and take care of one’s own. live and let live, and behave with a decent respect toward others. If there cannot be love — you call that love out there? — there will be a tight-lipped courtesy between men. And chivalry toward women. Women must be saved from the whoredom they’ve chosen. Women will once again be strong and modest. Children will be merry because they will know what they are to do.

Oh, you wish to know what my own life will be like? (Look at you, all at once abstract and understanding and leading me on, all ears like one of these psychologists: why can’t you priests stick to being priests for a change?) Very well, I will tell you. I plan to marry Anna here in the next room. I think she’ll have me. You can marry us if you like. I shall love and protect her. I can make her well. I know that I can just as I know I can do what I choose to do. She is much better already. Yesterday we watched the clouds flying along and she smiled. She is the first woman of the new order. For she has, so to speak, endured the worst of the age and survived it, undergone the ultimate violation and come out of it not only intact but somehow purged, innocent. Who else might the new Virgin be but a gang-raped social worker? I do not joke. Her ordeal has made her like a ten-year-old.

We shall live in this neighborhood. I like it here. New Orleans is a shabby gentle benign place. We shall buy a small Victorian cottage under the levee and live a simple life.

But we will not tolerate this age. It is not enough to destroy it. We shall build a new order.

Actually, you don’t have to worry. Killings will not be necessary. I have discovered something. I’ve discovered that even in this madhouse if you tell someone something, face to face, with perfect seriousness, without emotion, gazing directly at him, he will believe you. One need only speak with authority. Was not that the new trait that people noticed about your Lord, that he spoke with authority?

The point is, I will not tolerate this age. Millions agree with me and know that this age is not tolerable, but no one will act except the crazies and they are part of the age. The mad Mansons are nothing more than the ultimate spasm-orgasm of a dying world. We are only here to give it the coup de grâce. We shall not wait for it to fester and rot any longer. We will kill it.

You are looking at me for a change. Good. At least you are not smiling at me. Yes, I am a patient in a mental hospital, more than that, a prisoner. Yes, I am aware that you are accustomed to the ravings of madmen. Yes, I see you are aware that I give myself a certain license to talk crazy, so to speak. I might even be joking. But I am also aware from a certain wariness in your eyes that you are not absolutely certain I am not serious. You must decide that for yourself.

Why do I tell you this? As a warning. You can issue the warning if you like. There is only a little time. Perhaps a matter of months. The 69ers poster had better come down. But of course it will not.

We will not tolerate the way things are.

What’s the matter? You look stricken for the first time since you’ve been coming here. Ha ha, so at last I’ve gotten a rise out of you.

What did you say? What happened to me?

What do you mean? Do you mean what happened at Belle Isle?

That’s in the past. I don’t see what difference it makes.

You want to know what happened?

Hm. It’s hard to remember. Jesus, let me think. My head aches. I feel lousy. Let me lie down for a while. You don’t look so hot either. You’re pale as a ghost.

Come back tomorrow.