Lancelot

7

HOW COME YOU’RE WEARING your priest uniform today? Are you girding for battle or dressed up like Lee for the surrender?

Never mind. I wasn’t thinking about you anyway but about Margot.

“You men flatter yourselves,” I remember Margot telling me. “You are not that important to us.”

You men? Us? Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?

Christ, what were we talking about? Oh yes, Percival, you wanted to know what happened? Jesus, what difference does it make? It is the future that matters. Yes, you’re right. I did say there was something that still bothered me. What? Sin? The uncertainty that there is such a thing? I don’t remember. Anyhow, it doesn’t seem very interesting.

What a gloomy day. The winter rains have set in. I understand there is a depression in the Gulf. It’s a bit late for hurricanes, isn’t it? Isn’t it November?

But it would be appropriate, would it not? A hurricane coming now while I tell you about Hurricane Marie a year ago which came while an artificial movie hurricane was blowing down Belle Isle!

Really I should be feeling good if another hurricane is on the way. I used to enjoy hurricanes. Most people do, though they won’t admit it, everybody does in fact, except a few sane people, for after all hurricanes are by any sane standard very unpleasant affairs. But what does that prove except that most people today are crazy? I am supposed to be crazy but one sign of my returning sanity is that I don’t in the least look forward to hurricanes. I knew a married couple once who were bored with life, disliked each other, hated their own lives, and were generally miserable — except during hurricanes. Then they sat in their house at Pass Christian, put a bottle of whiskey between them, felt a surge of happiness, were able to speak frankly and cheerfully to each other, laugh and joke, drink, even make love. But that is crazy. Why should people be miserable in good weather and happy in bad? Surely not because they are sinners in good weather and saints in bad. True, people help each other in catastrophes. But they don’t feel good because they help each other. They help each other because they feel good. No, it’s because something has happened to us which is so bad that we don’t even have a word for it. Sin isn’t the word. Your Christ didn’t exactly foresee anything like this, did he? Hurricanes, which are very bad things, somehow neutralize the other bad thing which has no name, so that one can breathe easy, become free once again to sin or not to sin. The couple I spoke of became free and happy only during the passage of the eye of the hurricane, that is, capable of both love and hate (ordinarily they were numb, moved like ghosts), of honesty and lying. It became possible for the husband to say: “Often I secretly wish you were dead. In fact, an hour ago, before the hurricane struck, I was thinking it wouldn’t be a bad idea if the hurricane blew away the belvedere and you with it — I’d take my chances.” (Is that a sin?) “In fact I was contemplating my new life as a widower. Not such a bad prospect. Think of the women I could have here in Pass Christian without you around.” A window crashed before the wind, showering them with glass splinters. He looked at the blood. “But now I can honestly say it is good we are together. If you blew away. I’d come after you.” To which the wife replied: “The truth is, I’m bloody tired of cooking and housekeeping for you. If we live through this. I think I’ll go out and get a job. Perhaps move out altogether. Then it will be nice to see you in the evenings. We used to have a good time. I liked you. I feel much better in fact. Let’s bandage the cuts and have a drink.” They had several drinks. The wind howled and they laughed like children. The house shook like a leaf. They made love in a 160-mile-per-hour gust.

To tell you the truth, it didn’t work out for them after all. Or maybe it did. Anyhow, after the hurricane they took a good hard look at each other on a sunny Monday morning and got a divorce.

I found Margot in the belvedere atop Belle Isle battening down the house for Hurricane Marie. She looked surprised to see me, squinting at me during the lightning flashes as if she couldn’t place me. It came as a shock to her to see me leave my customary niche in place and time. It makes people nervous for one to step out of one’s role. I had become for her part of the furniture of Belle Isle, like the console with the petticoat mirror.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, then again looked puzzled to have asked such a strange question. Why shouldn’t I be here in my own house?

“What are you doing here?”

“I can’t get this dern window down.” The belvedere with its widow’s walk outside looked like the passenger cabin of a small ferry. Benches and windows lined the four sides.

Helping her with the window. I found myself thinking how, despite her several transformations, she still had a lot of Texas country girl in her. Even after she became a Southern belle. Mardi Gras matron, chatelaine of Belle Isle, she’d forget and curse like a cowboy — it only took pain, finger caught in station-wagon door: “Shee-it fire!” Or impatience with blacks: “What the hail you think you’re doing, boy,” she’d holler at Fluker gaping and goofing off at his sweeping, snatch the broom, and sweep like a frontier wife. Sharp of eye and quick to observe and imitate, she lapsed only in her swear words and her way of disposing of her mucus. Now and then she’d hawk and spit. One time when we were leaving Le Début des Jeunes Filles de Nouvelle Orléans, clear of the door and safe in the dark, she leaned out over the gutter on Royal Street and blew her nose with her fingers, slinging snot expertly. I could imagine her in her senility, dropping all her latter-day guises and cursing and hawking in a nursing home.

She was as quick to pick up the bad manners of the film folk as the good manners of the gentry, yet she did it good-humoredly as if these transformations might be necessary but were not to be taken too seriously. What was surprising was how quickly she got onto the nutty nuances of actors and such. In a matter of weeks she had shed her Texas drawl and picked up the round deracinated bell tone of Raine Robinette, who like June Allyson (Merlin said) came from Washington Heights, even the plaintive up-pitched grace note at the end of each sentence, Raine’s trademark, so Merlin had to correct her — she dropped it as quickly — and the actors’ way of droning away in their mock enthusiasm for mock projects. Jacoby would go on and on about moving to Louisiana and starting a crawfish farm, going into great detail about the marketing and distribution of this remarkable shellfish, yet do it with a slight gap of inattention even to himself as if he were listening to his voice. What was surprising was how good she was at acting like one of them and how lousy she was at acting the second the cameras rolled.

In the lightning flashes I was looking at her and thinking how much I loved her. “Loved” her? Being “in love.” What does that mean? It means that I lived for love. “Lived for love.” What does that mean? It means simply that she was my happiness and that without her I was not happy. As the saying goes, I didn’t know what happiness was until I met her. Do you notice that it is impossible to speak of love without sounding like Tin Pan Alley? But it’s the truth nevertheless. I can’t live without you. Jesus, is there any other way to say it? I might have been content in my unhappiness if I had not met her, like one of those cave fish that don’t have eyes and don’t miss the sun.

But if I loved her, why did the discovery of her infidelity cause a pang of pleasure within me?

Before we were married she would drive by my office mid-afternoons and pick me up. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“But, Margot, I’m bushed”—I, a mole, a creaky, seer-suckered, liberal mole droning out the days with title search, estate succession, and integrating the schools of Feliciana Parish. Perhaps this was what I thought happiness was: keeping the River Road estates intact for the white gentry and evening things up by helping the Negroes.

Off we’d go, up or down the River Road, she driving her little $20,000 Mercedes, top down. I still blinking like a mole in the October sunlight beside her, dusty from the Annotated Louisiana Code, sniffing the German leather warm and fragrant in the sun.

Strange: It was almost as if she were the man, I the woman, so much did she take the lead, work the radio, drive the car like a man, drum her nails on the wheel, gauge the traffic, look swiftly back past me to change lanes, cast ahead in her mind for destination and route. I lumpish and docile in the seat beside her, hands in my lap, like a big dumb coed.

Like a man she was. I said, except that she would tilt her head and cut her eyes over to me, lids narrowed, lips thinned, seriously yet unseriously, as no man ever did. Or, to make herself comfortable in the hot afternoon sun, in a quick second’s motion lift her ass off the seat (she could dress in thirty seconds: she told me when she was a child she used to walk to town on Saturday in school clothes and change in the filling station restroom), hike her skirt up exposing her legs. Thought I, goofy from work and drunk on October pine-winey sunlight, catching sight of the sweet heavy convergence of her inner thighs: that is where I want to live, make my habitation.

“Well?” she’d say, driving up on the levee, stopping and leaning over the wheel cradled in her arms (like a man), gaze sideways at me, diamonds of sweat glittering on her upper lip.

Aha! She’s parked. What next? I felt a tingling running up the backs of my legs. Is this the way a woman feels, I wondered, when the man parks? Hm. We’re parked! What next?

“You know what you are?” she’d ask.

“No, what?”

“A big raunchy Sterling Hayden.”

“Who’s he?”

“Sterling Hayden tending bar in Macao, in seersuckers.”

“Is that good?”

They were beautiful October days. Do you know that I made one of the biggest discoveries of my life? It is the simplest of all discoveries but do you know that to this good day I don’t know whether I was the last man on earth to make it or whether I was the only man. Was I the dumbest man in the world or the luckiest? It is this: There is a life to be lived and a joy in living it and the joy has nothing to do with our crazy college carryings-on or with my crazy romantic dream of love with Lucy at Highlands. No, it was so much simpler than that. It was simply that there is such a thing as a beautiful day to go out into, a road to travel, good food to eat when you’re hungry, wine to drink when you’re thirsty, and most of all, 99 percent of all, no: all of all: a woman to love.

What else is there really in life, dear Percival, than love, an October day, a slope of levee, warm lips to kiss, and this droll man-woman creature lying beside me who was mostly man driving the car until the moment I kissed her, when all at once she became all woman and I could feel her neck giving way in that sweet flection-extension no man’s vertebrae ever managed, and her body of itself and in all its lovely breadth turn toward me on its axis to greet, salute me.

Yes, she loved me then. How do I know? Because at last I woke from my stupor and, remembering what courting was, courted her. In love, I drove to New Orleans to get her out of a Colonial Dames convention (for some reason it was important to her to be a Dame and damned if she didn’t haul me to South Carolina to find and photograph the tombstone of her only WASP ancestor (no Reilly in that war! a Johnson — sure enough, a Private Aaron Johnson killed in the Battle of Cowpens!). Into the ballroom of the St. Charles I walked, and up and down the aisle until I spied her in the crowd of two thousand lily-white Dames listening to another Dame talking about preserving U.S. ideals and so forth and, spotting her, signaled her out with a peremptory angling off of head and she came out, at first fearful: Was somebody dead? — then clapped her hands with joy, hugged and kissed me: “Oh, I’m so glad to see you! You came to see me! to get me? Oh oh—”

Being “in love” means that my heart leaped at the sight of her. I felt like clapping my hands too. Why her and no other woman? She had two eyes, a nose, mouth, legs like a billion other women — like a million other good-looking women, yet she acquired for me a priceless value. Elizabeth Taylor, as beautiful as she was then, could have walked by and I wouldn’t have looked at her twice. It was almost religious. Things she owned were like saints’ relics. The place where she lived with Tex, the big Garden District house, became a shrine — I could drive around and around the block and feel the tingle in my legs when I caught sight of the house — a Taj Mahal which held my live princess.

Was it possible that a man could be so happy on one afternoon and that there were so many afternoons? It was all so simple. We’d drive until we found a pretty place, a stretch of levee, a meadow off the Natchez Trace. We’d walk till we got tired, drink, eat, kiss, neck!

A confession: She took the lead the first time. No, not the first. The second. The first was my crude way with her the first time I saw her, barefoot and muddy, at Belle Isle, getting under her hoopskirt and so forth.

That day we had eaten crawfish étouffé and gumbo and drunk two bottles of wine and were full and happy and zooming up the River Road in the October twilight and I was thinking of a place to go to park, maybe even a meadow to lie in. But she just said: “Let’s go to bed.” I swallowed hard and felt like saying gollee or something like, a thirty-five-year-old man: gollee. Nowadays any eighteen-year-old would laugh at me. Yes, but I notice that young men are not as happy with their girls, at least not as happy as I was. “Do you know a place?” she asked. Happily, I did, in Asphodel, a little tourist cottage in a glen off the Trace. My hand trembled as I registered. She undressed without bothering to turn out the light (as quickly as in the Texaco restroom in Odessa: zip! zip! naked!). She stood naked before the mirror, hands at her hair, one knee bent, pelvis aslant. She turned to me and put her hands under my coat and in her funny way took hold of a big pinch of my flank on each side. Gollee. Could any woman have been as lovely? She was like a feast. She was a feast. I wanted to eat her. I ate her.

That was my communion, Father — no offense intended, that sweet dark sanctuary guarded by the heavy gold columns of her thighs, the ark of her covenant.

I helped her with the windows in the belvedere. It was not a hurricane yet but an ordinary thunderstorm. From this height one could see in the lightning white caps in the river and the far bank. It was like the sea.

She sat on the bench eyes straight ahead like a seasick passenger.

“Margot, let’s leave.”

“What?” The storm made a racket.

“Let’s get in the car and drive to North Carolina. Right now. The colors are at their height. Siobhan is with Tex, Lucy’s going back to school tomorrow.”

She was silent.

“Think of it. We could drive clear of the hurricane, make it to Atlanta by two o’clock.” I was thinking about the moment of entering a motel with her, the moment she always paused at the mirror and raised her hands to her hair. I was also trying to remember the last time I slept with her. How had it happened that we were not sleeping together? What was I doing living in an outhouse? I tried to remember.

“No.” I had to sit close to her to hear for she spoke without raising her voice, eyes staring unfocused and unblinking. “The company is leaving day after tomorrow. We — they — can’t afford to lose two or three days to a hurricane. And there’s no need really. The two or three interior Belle Isle scenes can be shot anywhere.”

“I know. That’s why you can leave.”

“No.” Her noes tolled like a bell. Then she said in the same voice, eyes not moving: “Jan needs me to work with him on his screen treatment of A Doll’s House.”

“A Doll’s House?”

“It’ll be Jan’s first big film — the first he can do exactly as he wants.”

“And you? What’s your part in this?”

She misunderstood me. I meant her part with Jacoby. What was he to her, she to him?

“I’m Nora, Lance.” She looked at me for the first time. The storm was closer and the lightning flickered like a strobe light. Her eyes seemed to dart.

“Nora?”

“The lead, remember?”

“Yes, I remember.”

She clapped her hands. “I’m good, Lance! I’m really good. I’m so happy. I’ve never known what it is to have a talent and to develop it. To function! To function like — a fine watch. Like Olivier or Hepburn.”

“You’re putting up the money.”

“Yes, and I’ll never make a better investment. Jan’s ideas are so exciting. For him cinema is not just another medium. You have to understand communication theory. Cinema is the medium par excellence for our times.”

Cinema. Five years ago she’d have said, Let’s go to the movies. And we’d go see Steve McQueen. We’d eat popcorn and when I finished I’d put my buttery fingers between her legs.

“Why do you and Jacoby need to do a script? Isn’t Ibsen good enough?”

“You don’t understand. We’re not primarily interested in ideas as Ibsen was. It is Nora as a person and the narrative. Jan believes—”

“Let’s leave right now, Margot. We could drive all night. Do you remember doing that and sleeping in a meadow by the Shenandoah River?”

“No. I owe this to myself. But let me explain. Jan’s theory is that by the very nature of the medium cinema should have nothing to do with ideas. The meaning of a film derives from the narrative itself. Narrative and person are everything. What’s more, the treatment has to be done before England.”

“England?”

“That’s where we’re going to shoot it.”

“You mean you’re going to England?”

“That’s where he’s going to shoot it. It will cut costs by half.”

“Then you’re going to England?”

“Do you think I’d miss the chance to play Nora?”

“Are you sure you’re going to?”

“I just told you — Oh. You mean Jan’s going to take my money and kick me out.”

“How does Tex feel about it?” Surely that stupid-shrewd old man could see through this.

“Tex and Siobhan are beside themselves.”

“They’re going?”

“Can you see Tex not going?”

“I think you might have told me.”

“Honey, I was going to. We only decided last night.” I was silent for a while. She said: “Don’t worry about me being cheated, Lance. You don’t know Jan. He’s so—”

“Do you?”

“I know him. I know him like a—” She paused.

“A lover?”

“Lover. Of course I love him dearly. I love Bob Merlin. I love you. I love Siobhan. I love Tex. But it’s all different.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Oh boy oh boy oh boy. It’s not all that important, you know.”

“What’s not?”

“Sex. You men set so much store by it. Well, you flatter yourselves. It’s not all that important.”

Why couldn’t I ask her what I wanted to know?

“Did you—?”

“What?”

“Nothing.” I couldn’t ask.

“I don’t mess with anybody and you know it. Believe it or not, I’ve found something more important than the almighty penis.”

I think I blushed. I wished she wouldn’t say penis. It sounded white and bent off. But what would I have her say? dick? pecker? prick? tallywhacker?

Can I explain to you how relieved I was? Relieved to hear her say so easily that she had no lovers? Such off-handedness was worth a hundred oaths. It was true! But what about Siobhan’s father? Even science can make mistakes.

But here’s the real question. Did I want her guilty or innocent? And if she were guilty and I knew it — and I knew it as surely as I know that my blood type A plus B does not equal Siobhan’s 0—why did I want to hear her say it? Why did I believe her denial? Which is better, to have a pain and find no cause or to locate the abscess, loose the pus?

The storm was worse. The belvedere rattled and rocked like the Tennessee Belle. Lightning was almost constant. A bolt hit the lightning rod. A blue light rolled along the widow’s walk like a ball of yarn.

Margot was frightened. She grabbed me. “Jesus, Lance, we’re going to be killed.”

She was scared to death. She wanted to be held. I held her.

“Let’s lie down here.”

As suddenly she let go of me. “The bench is too narrow.”

“On the floor.”

“It’s wet.”

“Standing up then. I’ll hold you up like Dana.”

“That fag.”

“Well—”

“I have to go. I’m dead. Would you believe that acting is more exhausting than ditchdigging?”

Would I believe? I didn’t know. But I meant to find out.

Do you think I’m crazy? Look at me.

Do you hear the bluejays and the children crying in the street? The very sound and soul of late after-school afternoons in the fall. Listen. They are singing skip-rope songs.

Charlie Chaplin went to France

To teach the girlies how to dance

And this is the way he taught them:

Hoola hoola

Ponchatoola

Salute to the captain

Bow to the queen

Turn your back on the submarine

Charlie Chaplin sat on a pin

How many inches did it go in?

One, two, three …

They’re counting. That’s called doing “hots.”

The innocence of children. Didn’t your God say that unless you become as innocent as one of those, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven? Yes, but what does that mean?

It is obvious he made a mistake or else played a very bad trick on us. Yes, I remember the innocence of childhood. Very good! But then after a while one makes a discovery. One discovers there is a little secret that God didn’t let us in on. One discovers your Christ never did tell us about it. Yet God himself so arranged it that you wake up one fine morning with a great thundering hard-on and wanting nothing more in life than a sweet hot cunt to put it in, drive some girl, any girl, into the ground, and where is the innocence of that? Is that part of the innocence? If so, he should have said so. From child to assailant through no doing of one’s own — is that God’s plan for us? Damn you and your God. Between the two of you, you should have got it straight and had it one way or the other. Either it’s good or it’s bad, but whichever it is, goddamn say so. Only you don’t. You fuck off somewhere in between. You want to have it both ways: good, but — bad only if — and so forth. Well, you fucked up good and proper, fucked us all up, for sure fucked me up. I’ll take the Romans or the old Israelites who didn’t worry about women. David had three hundred women but wanted another one. God didn’t hold it against him.

There are only three ways to go. One is their way out there, the great whorehouse and fagdom of America. I won’t have it. The second way is sweet Baptist Jesus and I won’t have that. Christ, if heaven is full of Southern Baptists, I’d rather rot in hell with Saladin and Achilles. There is only one way and we could have had it if you Catholics hadn’t blown it: the old Catholic way. I Lancelot and you Percival, the only two to see the Grail if you recall. Did you find the Grail? You don’t look like it. Then we knew what a woman should be like, your Lady, and what a man should be like, your Lord. I’d have fought for your Lady, because Christ had the broadsword. Now you’ve gotten rid of your Lady and taken the sword from Christ.

I won’t have it. I won’t have it your way or their way. I won’t have it your way with your God-bless-everything-because-it’s-good-only-don’t-but-if-you-do-it’s-not-so-bad. Just say whether a sweet hot cunt is good or not. I won’t have it your way and I won’t have it their way, the new way. A generation stoned and pussy free and devalued, pricks after pussy, pricks after pricks, pussy after pussy. But most of all pussy after pricks. Christ what a country! A nation of 100 million voracious cunts. I will not have my son or my daughter grow up in such a world. When I say I won’t have it, I’m serious. I won’t have it. I won’t have my son … Very well, I will make another confession: My son is a homosexual now and I can understand why. He told me he was terrified of all the pussy after him. All the girls want to fuck and it scared him. Think of it: all those hot little cunts waiting to see if he was up to servicing them. Well, he couldn’t, he was too scared. He found it easier, the scared little prick, to be with other scared little pricks. And I can’t say I blame him. Now there are four of them, four nice scared young men living happily together in the French Quarter needlepointing Louis Quinze chairs.

So you fucked it up good and we’re going to have to pull it out for you. We? Who are we? You will find out soon enough. It is enough for you to know how it is going to be, for we are the new Reformation, which is to say we are going to tell you something and show you something you should have known all along.

We are going to set it out for you, what is good and what is bad, and no Jew-Christian waffling bullshit about it. What we are is the last of the West. What we are is the best of you, Percival, and the best of me, Lancelot, and of Lee and Richard and Saladin and Leonidas and Hector and Agamemnon and Richthofen and Charlemagne and Clovis and Martel. Like them we might even accept your Christ but this time you will not emasculate him or us. We’ll take the Grail you didn’t find but we’ll keep the broadsword and the great warrior Archangel of Mont-Saint-Michel and our Christ will be the stern Christ of the Sistine. And as for your sweet Jesus and your guitar-banging and ass-wiggling nuns, and your love feasts and peace kisses: there is no peace.

If I were a Jew, I’d know what to do. It’s easy. I’d be in Israel with the sabras. They’re my kind. The only difference between them and the Crusaders is that the Crusaders lost. Ha, isn’t that a switch, come to think of it — that the only Crusaders left in the entire Western world are the Israelis, the very Jews who huddled and shrank and grinned and nodded for two thousand years? The Jews are lucky. They know who they are and they have Israel. We have to make our own Israel, but we know who we are.

We know who we are and where we stand. There will be leaders and there will be followers. There are now, only neither knows which is which. There will be men who are strong and pure of heart, not for Christ’s sake but for their own sake. There will be virtuous women who are proud of their virtue and there will be women of the street who are there to be fucked and everyone will know which is which. You can’t tell a whore from a lady now, but you will then. You will do right, not because of Jew-Christian commandments but because we say it is right. There will be honorable men and there will be thieves, just as now, but the difference is one will know which is which and there will be no confusion, no nice thieves, no honorable Mafia. There are not many of us but since we are ready to die and no one else is, we shall prevail.

Women? What about women? You heard me. A man, a youth, a boy will know which women are to be fucked and which to be honored and one will know who to fuck and who to honor.

Freedom? The New Woman will have perfect freedom. She will be free to be a lady or a whore.

Don’t women have any say in this? Of course. And we will value them exactly as much as they value themselves. They won’t like it much, you say? The hell with them. They won’t have anything to say about it. Not only are they not strong enough. They don’t care enough. Guinevere didn’t think twice about adultery. It was Lancelot, poor bastard, who went off and brooded in the woods.

No more fuck-up about who fucks and who gets fucked. The best of women will be what we used to call ladies, like your Virgin. Our Lady. The men? The best of them will be strong and brave and pure of heart, not for Christ’s sake, but like an Apache youth or a Lacedemonian who denies himself to be strong. The others can whoremonger and screw whom they choose. But we will prevail.

No, it is not you who are offering me something, salvation, a choice, whatever. I am offering you a choice. Do you want to become one of us? You can without giving up a single thing you believe in except milksoppery. I repeat, it was your Lord who said he came to bring not peace but a sword. We may even save your church for you.

You are pale as a ghost. What did you whisper? Love? That I am full of hatred, anger? Don’t talk to me of love until we shovel out the shit.

What? What happened then? Don’t look so fearful. Nothing. I saw a dirty movie, that’s all.

Friday afternoon at the movies. That’s what I should call my own little film or videotape, which Elgin, my cinematographer, made of our little film company resting from their labors.

It was all very simple. Elgin came to my pigeonnier after lunch, entered as briskly as a vacuum-cleaner salesman, too briskly, with a large valise-like box and a case of reels and, without looking at me, set his suitcase on my desk, opened it, plugged it in, clipped two wires to the back of my TV, showed me how to put the reels in, and, without once having raised his eyes, made as if to leave.

“Elgin. Wait.”

He stood in the doorway, freeze-framed, waiting for me to push a button and set him going.

“Elgin, the film company is pulling out tomorrow. So you might be able to pull your equipment out today. I’ll let you know after I’ve seen these.”

“I done already pulled it out,” said Elgin not briskly at all but sullenly, as if I had violated some unspoken agreement. What agreement?

“Then you—”

“You won’t need to do any more taping.”

I looked at him.

“I see. That’ll be all. Go put your tour-guide coat on.”

He looked at me strangely, at first I thought sullenly, then I saw he was ashamed. I felt a sudden anger. Later, to my astonishment, it came over me why I was angry. Again a confession which does me little credit but it is important I tell you the truth. I had to admit I was angry because he had looked. Looked at the videotape. Then it was I discovered in myself what I had so often despised in others. For I had expected Elgin to do what I told him, to be a technological eavesdropper and spy for me but not listen or look. More than that: I had expected that somehow he could not look — just as the hicks I despised believed that through some magical or at least providential dispensation the Negro bellboy cannot see the naked white woman in the same hotel room. Cannot even if he wanted to: she is somehow invisible.

There is nothing like a liberal gone sour.

But I was wrong. He was ashamed, not of what he had seen, but of what he took to be his failure. A technical failure. I should have known.

“I’m sorry,” he said, hanging his head.

“I am too.” I still thought he meant he was sorry he had looked.

“It’s a negative effect I can’t explain.”

“Negative effect?”

“Did you ever hold a magnet against a TV screen?”

“No.”

“It pulls the images out of shape — the images being nothing but electrons, of course.”

“Yes, electrons.”

“I only watched enough to see that the effect is a little weird — But I think you may still have what you want.”

“Thank you.” Ha. Then he was my nigger after all, and if he could look, wouldn’t, didn’t. Or better, he looked for technical reasons but forbore to see. He was the perfect nigger.

He closed the door softly but presently opened it again. Again it was a Buell who still had the power to set things straight.

Elgin still didn’t look at me. All he said, face courteously inclined in the cracked door, as courteous as a Montgomery bellboy, you see, I’m not looking — was: “Mr. Lance, let me know if there is anything you need.”

“Okay.”

Note the exquisite courtesy of “anything you need.” He didn’t say: Let me know if you need any help, I’ll help you. He could have been understood as offering to bring a glass of water, a bourbon. It was for me to fathom the rest.

He looked now. He looked at me as sorrowfully as you — to hell with him.

One night at supper during a lull in the conversation Lucy, my daughter, who had said little or nothing and, feeling the accumulating necessity of saying something suitable, saw her chance and piped up, frowning and ducking her dark-brown head and saying it seriously: “It just occurred to me last night: here I am an adult human being, a person, and I have never seen my own cervix.”

There was a silence. I found myself worrying more about her worrying about her halting conversational entry than about her not seeing her cervix. But Raine and Dana nodded thoughtfully and even, I could see, with a certain courtesy and kindliness as if to encourage her timid foray into their lively talk. Raine put her arm around Lucy, gave her a hug, and said to me:

“Think of it! A mature woman who has never seen her own cervix!”

I thought about it.

Merlin, who did not like Raine, said not to Lucy but to Raine: “So what? I’ve never seen my own asshole. What’s the big deal?”

But it was Lucy who blushed and ducked her head even lower.