Lancelot

8

FRIDAY AFTERNOON AT THE MOVIES: A DOUBLE FEATURE

WHAT I MAINLY REMEMBER of the tapes is not the tapes themselves but the day outside. The videotapes, which came out as a movie on my tiny Trinitron and which I watched as gravely as I used to watch afternoon reruns of Gunsmoke, I think of now as a tiny theater set down in a great skyey afternoon loud with the rattle of blackbirds. The thunderstorm was gone, the hurricane was still a great Catherine wheel spinning slowly in the Gulf casting its pall of wind and rain two hundred miles ahead to the northeast while its northwestern quadrant sucked in the northern fall, the deep clear Canadian air funneling down, cirrus-flecked five miles high. There was no sign of a hurricane except a sense of urgency and a high commotion in the air. Restive blackbirds took alarm, rose in clouds from the marshes, settled, and rose again.

Something was indeed wrong with Elgin’s camera. The figures, tiny figurines, were reddish, like people in a film darkroom, and seemed to meet, merge, and flow through each other. Lights and darks were reversed like a negative, mouths opened on light, eyes were white sockets. The actors looked naked clothed, clothed naked. The figures seemed to be blown in an electronic wind. Bodies bent, pieces blew off. Hair danced atop heads like a candle flame. I stared. Didn’t Elgin say the figures were nothing but electrons?

FIRST FEATURE: MISS MARGOT’S ROOM

Who were these two dim rosy figures moving silently in a red sea?

I rewound the reel and examined the reel case. The label was neatly printed, MISS MARGOT’S ROOM, exactly like the chaste and formal museum signs mounted on the brass posts supporting velvet ropes in Belle Isle.

Two figures were standing, talking. They were not naked. Their clothes were light and their faces dark. It was Merlin and Margot. I recognized the shape of Merlin’s rooster shock of hair even though it flickered on his head like Pentecostal flame. Margot I knew instantly from the bright earmuff fluffs of hair at her ears and her mannish yet womanish way of setting her fist on her hip.

When they talked, their mouths opened on light.

They embraced.

The sound was not much better than the video. The voices were scratchy and seemed to come not from the room but from the sky like the blackbirds rattling and rising and falling. When they turned, their voices went away. Half sentences blew away like their bodies.

They embraced again. Merlin held her off, their bodies flowing apart like a Y.

MERLIN: You know that I always—(pause)—wish you every—

(You know that I always will love you? I wish you every happiness?)

MARGOT: (An assentive murmur.)

MERLIN: But what an ire — Oh, Christ — end — of a phizz infirm—

(But what an irony! Oh, Christ that it should end because of a physical infirmity?)

MARGOT: It did—

(It didn’t?)

MERLIN — a disproportion like Lee losing Gettysburg because of di—

(Diarrhea?)

MARGOT: Don’t be

MERLIN: It’s flat-out god — unax — Jesus.

(It’s flat-out goddamn unacceptable, Jesus?)

MARGOT: Jesus, men. You are all so—

(Jesus what?)

Were they talking about me?

No.

They embrace again. Blobs like breasts swell on Merlin’s shoulder and blow off toward Margot.

MERLIN: I fear for — But I wish you both ever—

(I fear for you. But I wish you both every happiness.)

You both? Me? No.

MARGOT: (A deprecative murmur.)

MERLIN: I love you so f (?) — v (?) — much.

(I love you so fucking much? so very much? probably the former considering the two-syllable beat.)

MARGOT: I love you — oh s — (?) — oh sh — (?)

(I love you too. Oh so much. Or: I love you too. Oh shit, or sheet? or she-it. Probably the last, two beats, two syllables, and knowing Margot.)

MERLIN: DO you believe I love — enough — truth?

(???)

MARGOT: (A wary murmur.)

MERLIN: Why — wonder—

(???)

MERLIN: —could be exploit—

(He could be exploiting you?)

MARGOT: (Turning away: they come apart, Y becoming II.)

MERLIN: (An expostulation.)

MARGOT:!

MERLIN: —mon—

(???) (Money?)

MARGOT: NO.

MERLIN: Christ — not — even sure — part.

(Christ, you’re not even sure you have the part?)

MARGOT: You bas—

(You bastard.)

MERLIN: Well—?

MARGOT: Up — oars, oo bas—

(Up yours, you bastard.)

MERLIN: Oh, Jesus — I’d kike — oars.

(Oh, Jesus how I’d like to be up yours?)

MARGOT: (An indifferent murmur.)

MERLIN: Besides that — a basic incap — intimace—

(Besides that he has a basic incapacity for intimacy?)

MARGOT: I don’t care.

MERLIN: What a lousy trucking fire engine.

(What a lousy fucking triangle? I am reasonably sure of this reading: that it was not Elgin’s equipment but Merlin himself who scrambled “fucking triangle” to “trucking fiangle” (fire engine). A joke. Yes, I am 99 percent sure.)

MARGOT: DO you believe I still — you?

(Do you believe I still love you?)

MERLIN: Oh, Chr—

MARGOT: Sh — sh — sh!

(Shush shush shush? or: shit shit shit? shit shit shit.)

The tiny figurines embrace again, sectors of their trunks blowing out like pseudopods of amoebae. Their bodies seem to have magnetic properties.

MERLIN: —wish you — all happ—

(I wish y’all happiness? I wish you all happiness? The latter? Merlin wouldn’t say “y’all.”)

Merlin vanishes. Margot droops and is still, like a puppet hung from its string.

It is a triangle. At first I thought I was part of the triangle, the losing angle, so:

Then I see they are not talking about me at all, that it is a different triangle:

Another figure materializes (they don’t seem to use doors). It is Jacoby. There is no way of recognizing him except by his shortness and stockiness and his big head, which he carries confidently between his shoulders. Like many short men he is of a piece, body, brain, organs compacted and operating in close order. All would be well with him, one feels, except he is shorter than Margot. He makes up for this shortcoming by a kind of confident lolling back of head. It is his way of not having to look up at her; he holds her off as if to say: Well, my dear, let’s have a look at you.

They make a Y connected as far as the waist.

They do not speak but their mouths and eyes open on light. Are they whispering?

They dress, putting dark on light. No, it is undressing, for dark is light and light is dark. They are shedding light clothes for dark skin.

They approach each other. Sections of their bodies detach and fly off. Other sections extend pseudopods.

They turn, their hair blowing sideways in an electric wind. There are two sockets of light on Margot’s back. They are, I recognize, the two dimples on either side of her sacrum.

Margot lies across the bed and pulls him onto her. He is gazing down at her. Her head comes off the bed and bends back until her face is looking upside down at the camera. Her eyes close on light, but her mouth opens letting out light.

Still there is no conversation but presently a voice says, at first I think from my room or even from the sky with the blackbirds: Oh oh oh ah ah aaah, oh my Jesus oh ah ah sh — sh — sh—

???

But the voice is not immediately recognizable as either Margot’s or Jacoby’s, being hoarser than Margot’s and higher than Jacoby’s.

A prayer?

INTERMISSION

I switch off the machine and walk out into the skyey day. There is the blinded dazzled headachy sensation of coming out of a movie in the afternoon. The blackbirds are rising and settling, the wind has picked up but is fitful, blowing sycamore leaves back and forth across my tiny pigeon porch.

I sit on my porch and watch the blackbirds rising and settling and the clouds hurrying toward the hurricane like latecomers to the kickoff.

The blackbirds fall silent. The clouds straighten out and form a line. The sky becomes flat and yellow. The view from the porch is very simple. There are six parallel horizontal lines, the bottom rail of the iron fence, the top rail, the near edge of the River Road, the far edge, the top of the levee, the straight bottom line of the clouds. There are many short vertical lines, the iron spikes of the fence. There is a single oblique line, a gravel road leading from the River Road over the levee. Atop the levee are the triangles of the bonfires. The slanting boom of a ship intersects with the triangle of the bonfires, making trapezoids and smaller triangles.

The hurricane machine cranks up. The live oaks blow inside out. It is necessary to use the hurricane machine even though a real hurricane is coming, not just because the real hurricane is not yet here, but because even if it were it wouldn’t be as suitable for film purposes as an artificial hurricane.

SECOND FEATURE: MISS RAINES ROOM

There are three red figures on the pink bed. Pieces of bodies, ribs, thighs, torsos, fly off one body and join another body. Hair blows in a magnetic wind. Mouths and eyes open on light. Light pubic triangles turn like mobiles, now narrowing, now widening, changing from equilateral triangles to isosceles triangles to lines of light. The posters of the bed make a frame.

Lucy is lying lengthwise in the middle of the bed. She is recognizable by the flame-curl of hair under her ears, by her big breasts, and by the still slightly immature not wholly incurved line between calf and knee. Lucy is like a patient. Certain operations are being performed on her. The other two figures handle her as efficiently as nurses. Raine is slim and swift, moving so fast her body leaves ectoplasm behind. Dana stands naked and musing beside the bed, one hand browsing over his shoulder like an athlete in a locker room.

The three lie together. Their bodies fuse but their arms move like a six-arm Shiva.

Now they are doing something else. Dana kneels in a horizontal plane, takes Lucy’s head in both hands, and guides it toward him. Raine moves much more quickly. Her sleek head flies off and burrows into Lucy’s stomach.

The figures make a rough swastikaed triangle:

Elgin is right. The sound track is poor. No words are audible except near the end an unrecognizable voice which is neither clearly male or female seems to come from nowhere and everywhere — and only fragments at that: Oh Christ dear sweet Jesus oh oh—

Another prayer?

Crows begin to fly north against the wind. It is unusual to see crows in such numbers, flocking like blackbirds. Then they straggle out for a mile. Ellis Buell says crows are the smartest of all birds. This is probably true. At least I know for a fact they know the range of a shotgun (Fluker claims they can distinguish a twenty gauge from a twelve, then move just out of range). The only time I ever killed a crow was by pure luck and a.22 rifle. He was flying at least five hundred feet high. Without expectation I led him by three feet and shot him through the head. Surprised, he fell at my feet with a thump. A ruby drop of blood hung from his black bill.

Still I had to watch the 5:30 news!

Unhooking the videotape, I turned on the TV. The hurricane watch had been changed to a hurricane warning. Marie, two hundred miles due south, was headed due north. She filled the whole Gulf. It became necessary to make preparations.

Everyone became serious and happy.

Storekeepers seriously-happily boarded up their windows. Volunteers seriously-happily sandbagged the levee. Shoppers seriously-happily shopped for battery radios, batteries, flashlights, Coleman lamps, kerosene lamps, kerosene, candles, canned goods, powdered milk, dried apricots, Hershey bars, raisins.

Happiest and most serious of all were owners of fallout shelters dug out during the A-bomb scare many years ago and never used. Happy families huddled underground around TV sets showing Marie spinning ever closer.

Happy drinkers sat in friendly bars under the levee drinking Dixie beer and reminiscing about other hurricanes. Even householders of low-lying houses left home happily, headed for motels in the Mississippi hills. Ordinarily bored police rode happily up and down country roads and bayous warning people to evacuate.

I too made certain preparations. I made a shopping list but, unlike other shoppers, I first discarded certain objects before purchasing others. Assembling the video cameras, tape deck, tapes, recorder, amplifier — some $4,500 worth — I packed the lot in a Gladstone bag and at nightfall hauled it over the levee to a skiff locked to a cypress in the batture, rowed out two hundred yards, and dropped the bag in the channel. When I regained the batture I was half a mile downstream but it was easy rowing back in dead water.

Only then did I make my shopping list. Besides the usual hurricane items it contained:

1 18" Stillson wrench

4 10' sections Gerona plastic pipe, 3" diameter

4 3" sleeves

1 90° elbow

1 45° elbow

1 3" nipple (foot long)

1 3" to 1" reducer

1 lb. sealing PBC cmpd

1 roll duct tape

2 kerosene lamps

1 gal. kerosene

During the filming and before I went to the hardware store, I visited Tex and Siobhan. They were getting on each other’s nerves worse than ever. They both got on my nerves. Siobhan clung to me and beat me in the ribs with her fist. It was necessary to do something about Siobhan. It had been necessary for some time. The difference was that now it was possible to do something.

Siobhan loved music and took lessons on the old French spinet. Tex promised to buy her a new “pinana.”

“I’m going to buy you the biggest Steinway grand pinana in New Orleans. You gon play the new pinana for Tex?”

“No,” she said, not looking at Tex but clinging to my thigh with a fierce scissors grip of her thin legs and beating me fretfully. “Is he really going to buy me a piano?”

“Absotively, posalutely!” cried Tex.

Then I had a piece of luck. In his boring, repetitive way he began to come at me, jabbing me the way Siobhan beat me with her fist, jabbing with things he had said so often before he didn’t even listen himself.

“I’m telling you, boy, you better change that old black pipe under the house. That stuff rots like wood. I smelled a gas leak yesterday.”

“How could you smell it? There’s no captan in it. Methane has no smell.”

“I smelled it!”

He didn’t smell it. He wasn’t listening to himself. He didn’t even know he said he smelled it.

“I’m going to the hardware store now. Now listen to me, Tex. Here’s what I want you to do.”

For the first time he was startled to attention by my tone, as if somebody had jostled him and he had waked from a long boring dream. He was listening! I was going to tell him what to do. He knew this and knew he was going to do it.

“What?”

“For a long time you’ve wanted to take Siobhan to Odessa to visit your folks.”

“Sho,” he said, listening.

“I want her out of here tonight. This is a bad storm. Both of you get going now. I mean now. You can either drive to New Orleans and fly to Texas or drive all the way, but leave within the hour.”

It was the best I could do: Siobhan, I do believe the old bastard meant well, I only hope he didn’t drive you crazy or bore you to death.

“We’d rather drive, wouldn’t we, Siobhan? We’ll play count animals. I’ll count moocows and minnie cats and you count down hogs and twobit horses.”

“No fair!” said Siobhan, but she did let go of me and go to Tex. She liked the idea of a trip. “There are more cats and cows than hound dogs and quarter horses.”

They were going and that was that. Here is an incidental discovery: If you tell somebody what to do, they will do it. All you have to do is know what to do. Because nobody else knows.

The film company was shooting the last scene before the hurricane. The set was the front gallery of Belle Isle. It was the only remaining scene which could not be shot in Burbank. Following the scene, the crew planned to pack up their station wagons and go home.

It was not a long scene but it required many takes. In the scene the sharecropper, played by Elgin, and the sheriff, played by the actor who looked like Pat Hingle, come to Belle Isle accompanied by the Christlike hippy stranger, played by Dana, who has reconciled poor white sharecroppers, poor black sharecroppers, overseers, sheriffs, blacks, whites, and the half-caste girl, who was accepted by neither race. They have come to rescue the planter, played by Merlin, and his daughter the librarian, played by Margot, from the hurricane. The planter, however, fixed in his ancient prejudices and secretly liking the apocalyptic fury of the hurricane, decides to remain. He also expects his daughter to stay with him. The daughter decides to leave her father and go with the stranger. It is the farewell scene between father and daughter. After the farewell, the planter, who is not so much prejudiced as indifferent, caught up by aesthetic rather than social concerns, returns to the house alone, to his organ. Crashing chords of a Chopin polonaise fuse with the mounting fury of the hurricane.

“I want more of a Lear-like effect, Bob,” said Jacoby, turning off the hurricane machine after one of many takes. “You know, mad king raging on the heath, wild-eyed, hair blowing.”

“Yeah, right, Lear, okay,” said Merlin ironically, but Jacoby missed the irony.

Before the shooting began. I went to the bank and withdrew $75,000 from Margot’s and my checking account.

“What the hail, Lance?” said Macklin Maury Lamar, my cousin, who was president of the bank.

“We’re giving it to the American Negro College Fund.”

“Ah.”

I told him this for two reasons. One was that it was the only reason he would believe, believing as he did that I was still a liberal and therefore capable of any madness. (Yet curiously it was for him an understandable madness: you know how old Lance is, etc., etc.)

The other reason was that my explanation was, in a sense, true.

“Yeah,” said Macklin. “A wonderful cause. In fact I agree with you, that’s what they need.”

What was worrying Macklin was not this particular withdrawal but the likelihood of losing Margot’s and my half-million-dollar checking account. Or my asking him to pay interest.

“How do you want it, Lance?”

“In cash. Any denominations.”

“Why the cash, Lance?” asked Macklin, laughing heartily, eyes worried.

“I’m afraid your bank will blow down tonight. The money will be safer at Belle Isle.”

“There you go! Ha ha.” Macklin laughed and slapped his side, all the while keeping a sharp eye on me, trying to parse out craziness and horsiness, wondering whether I was ordinarily crazy as he always held me to be or possessed by some new craziness.

He gave me the $75,000 in hundreds in a locked canvas bag, handing me the little brass key separately.

After the shooting was finished at Belle Isle and the crew was busy dismantling the hurricane machine and packing their station wagons, I summoned Elgin to the pigeonnier and gave him the $75,000. He unlocked the bag with the little brass key. He looked at the money.

“How much money is this?”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

“What’s it for?”

“It’s very simple. I have a great deal of money, more than I can use, and there are two things you want.”

“Yes?”

“One is to finish your education at M.I.T. despite the fact that your scholarship has run out.”

“Yes.”

“The other is you want to marry your classmate Ethel Shapiro and buy a house in Woodale, a subdivision of Concord, which though a cradle of American liberty is unwilling to sell houses to blacks or Jews especially blacks married to Jews. Yet you are determined to buy a house there despite all obstacles.”

“Not despite. Because.” Elgin looked down at the money. “Okay. But you don’t owe me anything. I’d have done it for you anyway. It was an interesting problem. Sorry about the tape quality. The color was defective.”

“I liked it that way.”

“The sound was rotten, too. Jesus, I felt bad about that.”

“Don’t worry about it. It was okay.”

“Well—” said Elgin, standing in the doorway. He was always standing in the doorway.

“Yes?”

“I have a feeling there is something else. Perhaps a condition.”

“A condition?”

“Something you want me to do.”

“Only two things.”

“What?”

“Leave now.”

“Now?”

“Now. In the next hour.”

“The other is, don’t come back?”

“Right.”

“Okay.” We might have been discussing his chores for the day.

“Oh yes. Something else. Take Ellis and Suellen to Magnolia, Mississippi, where y’all have kinfolks. It’s on I-55, on your way north. They can return after the storm. You won’t have any trouble persuading them. They’re both scared to death. They are the only people around here who have any sense.”

“Okay. Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Me? I’m fine, Elgin.”

“Don’t you need me to help you move all those folks out of here?”

“No.”

“Okay. Well—”

We shake hands. He gives me a level-eyed look. He’s seen too many movies. Or maybe it’s being in one. The level-eyed look means we understand each other and have been reconciled, perhaps by the Christlike stranger played by Dana. When the truth is, nobody understands anyone else, and nobody is reconciled because nobody knows what there is to be reconciled. Or if there is something to be reconciled, the way it is done in the movies, by handshakes, level-eyed looks, expressions of mute understanding, doesn’t work.

Don’t you agree? No? Do you really believe people can be reconciled?

“One more thing, Elgin.”

“Yes?” He was standing in the doorway in a way he learned from Jacoby. It was an actor’s way of standing in a doorway at a moment of farewell, eyes fine, face slanted.

“When you shake hands with somebody, squeeze.”

“Okay,” he said frowning. He left slightly offended.

Did it ever occur to you in considering those instances of blacks who decide they want to act like whites and are very observant and successful in doing so (they are even better than the Japanese in imitating us — so much so that Elgin can act more like Mannix than Mannix) that no matter how observant one is, one cannot by observation alone assess the degree of squeeze in a handshake or even be sure there is a squeeze at all?

I was wrong about one thing. Merlin too had good sense and no taste for hurricanes. He was leaving.

For once I astonished myself: I wanted him to leave! I wanted him to get away, escape, the man who had made love to my wife in the Roundtowner Motor Lodge in Arlington, Texas, on or about July 15, 1968, and begot my daughter Siobhan.

Why?

Because he, poor old man, had come to as bad a place as a man can come to. Going back to Africa to find his youth. To see leopard. It was as if I had lit out for Asheville looking for dead Lucy. An old man should find new things. Shooting was too good for him. Anyhow I liked him and he liked me.

I caught him fidgeting up and down the gallery after the rest of the crew had gone.

“I was working on the causeway in the Keys when that son of a bitch (they had no women’s names for hurricanes then) hit in 1928. They’re no joke and I’d as soon not see another one.”

“Didn’t some people get killed?”

“About five hundred. Christ, what I haven’t seen in my life. What I haven’t done. Three things I’ve loved — women, life, and art.”

“In that order?”

“In that order.”

“Well, you’ve got plenty of life left.”

He looked at me, then looked at me again.

“Right!” he said. “And I’m in good shape. I’ve got a good body. Feel that, Lance,” he said, making a bicep.

“Okay. Very good.”

“That’s the arm of a young man. Feel my gut.”

“Flat and hard.”

“Hit me.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Go ahead, hit me. You can’t hurt me.”

“I believe you.”

“I can beat the shit out of anybody here — except you, Lance. I believe you could take me.”

“I doubt it. I’m in rotten shape.”

“You want to arm wrestle?”

“No.”

“You’ve got a good body. You know what you ought to do?”

“No.”

“Kung Fu. You’d be great at it. You’re a natural athlete, with an athlete’s grace and strength. It would be good for you.”

“You may be right, Merlin. You know what you ought to do?”

“What?”

“Get out of here.”

“We’re leaving the first thing tomorrow morning. Those other nuts want to spend the night.”

“Marie is arriving tonight. You may not be able to leave tomorrow.”

“I know. But those bastards want to make a party out of it. Margot ought to have better sense.”

“If I were you, I would leave now. It’s all the same to me.” It was.

He paced the gallery, frowning, cocked an eye at the yellow sky.

“Or is Jacoby still the director?”

“Jacoby! That son of a bitch couldn’t direct traffic in Boutee, Louisiana.”

“Well?”

He snapped his finger. “By God I will leave!” His spinning white-fibered eye looked past me into the future. He snapped his finger again. “You know what I’m going to do?”

“No.”

“I’m going to head north right out of this swamp. I’m going to drive straight to Virginia, up the Shenandoah Valley, and pick up Frances, who has a horse farm near Lexington. I’ll say to her: Let’s go back to Tanzania. We were there once. We lived in a Land Rover. We saw leopard. She’s a soldier, a good girl. She might even — She’s always been my love. I took her once to Spain and showed her the Ebro River, where I fought. Yes, Christ, I did that too. Can you believe it? She’s a good girl, a comrade. She’s a comrade, brother, daughter, lover to me. All I have to do is say, Honey, let’s go back to the high country, and she’ll go. Jesus, what an idea you’ve given me! I might even do a film. What do you think of a film about a man and woman who are good comrades, go on a hunt, and then have good sex together?”

“It sounds fine.”

“If it is fine, why do I feel so rotten? I’ve always been a man with a great longing and lust for life and love, Lance. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“I know it could be good between me and Frances again.”

“It might be.”

“Tell me honestly.”

“It’s possible.”

“It would be good even if—”

“Yes, it would.”

“I feel rotten now but it could be good between us. What do you think?”

“I think it might be good between you.”

“Frances knows me better than any other woman.”

“I’m sure of it.”

“She and I were always good together.”

“That’s good.”

“We could be good together again.”

“I’m sure of that.”

“I might do something, a story, something, about the dying out of the wildebeest and the death too of human love and then a renewal and a greening, a greening and a turning back of the goddamn advancing Sahara. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“The Sahara of the soul too.”

“Yes, but right now you ought to think of leaving.”

“I’m leaving. I’ll speak to the others.”

“What about the others?” I asked with a slight constriction of anxiety in the throat.

“To say goodbye. Christ, they wouldn’t dream of leaving. Do you know what they’re doing now?”

“No.”

“Raine is taking sandwiches and champagne up to your belvedere. They’re going to have a party named Goodbye movie, hello Marie.”

I must have looked blank for he explained: “Goodbye movie hurricane, hello the real thing.”

“That’s a good place to get killed up there. Too much glass.”

“Just try to tell them that.”

“I intend to speak to Margot.”

“On second thought why don’t you tell her goodbye for me. As for the others, I’d as soon Marie blew their asses in the river. Do you know what those batbrains are doing?”

“No.”

“They’re popping pills and hauling anisette and tequila up to the belvedere. They’re going to have a party.”

“I know.”

Merlin gave me a long firm handshake with two hands and a long level-eyed stare clouded with hidden meanings. He’d been in the movies too long.

“Lucy, jump in your Porsche and take off for school. You’ve got thirty minutes.”

“Papaaauh!” She trailed off in a musical downbeat-up-beat, an exact rendering of Raine’s famous mannerism.

“You heard me.”

“I want to stay with Raine through the hurricane.”

“No goddamn it. Now get going.”

Lucy looked surprised. Everyone acted as if I were an ancestor who had wandered out of his portrait and begun giving orders. Everyone obeyed from sheer surprise.

Later I heard Lucy ask Suellen, who was packing her metal candy boxes in Elgin’s Plymouth Charger: “What’s got into Papa?”

“Mr. Lance know what he doing, girl,” said Suellen conventionally but in truth relieved that somebody, anybody, was taking charge.

“What’s the hurry. Papa?” asked Lucy, thinking of Raine again.

“Well, for one thing, they need you at the Tri-Phi house. I just talked to Mrs. Davaux. The freshmen are getting panicky even though the storm is only going to sideswipe them. Mrs. Davaux thinks you’re the one to calm them. She says you have real leadership qualities. Otherwise you’re going to lose half your pledges to the Chi O’s — whose seniors are all back.” (I did talk to Mrs. Davaux and she did say something like that.)

Ah, that was a different story. A hard choice between Raine and Troy and the hurricane, and shoring up wavering Tri-Phi pledges. Her Tri-Phi loyalties would have won out, I think, even without my orders.

“Anyhow, Raine’s not leaving. She’ll be around for a while.”

It was true in a sense.

“Okay, Papa. To tell you the truth, I’m a little scared.”

“Good. Now get going.”

“Okay, Papa.”

Putting her hands on my shoulders, she held me off, setting her head to one side Rainelike. Jesus Christ, the movies.

“Papa, I love you.”

“I love you too.”

The wind was picking up. Now it was sustained between gusts. I went out on the galleries and closed the shutters, shot the heavy bolts. They locked from the outside.

Afterwards I met Raine in the hall on her way to the belvedere with a tray.

“What’s the matter with you, Lance?”

“What do you mean?”

“You look awful.”

“I’m tired.”

“Here. I’ve got drinks right here.”

“No thanks.”

“Then try a couple of these. One now and one later.” She gave me two capsules. “They’re the best of all downers. They leave you relaxed but euphoric. You feel absolutely free to choose, to plan and act. You can choose to sleep or not to sleep. You become your true self.”

I looked at her. “Very well.”

The truth was, I needed something. There was a cold numbing sensation spreading from the pit of my stomach. What I really wanted was a drink.

She set down the tray and poured me a drink of water. I swallowed both pills. She looked at me. “Why don’t we meet later tonight?”

“Very well.”

She started up the attic steps.

“I wouldn’t stay up there too long, Raine. The wind is expected to reach over a hundred. The glass may not hold.”

“We won’t. We’re just enjoying the lovely sky and clouds and lightning. Did you ever see such a sky? Why don’t you join us?”

“Not right now. Send Margot down though. I want to speak to her.”

Margot came down. She stood in the dark hall at right angles to me, arms crossed, foot cocked on heel.

“Margot, will you leave with me now? We can go anywhere you like.”

“No.”

“Then will you come and stay with me tonight?”

“No.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“What do you mean, that’s it?”

“I do love you, Lance.”

“But—”

“No buts. I love you as I’ve always loved you, with the old me. But there are other me’s. One grows.”

“Then love me with the old me.”

“What can I do?” She shrugged. She was not too attentive. Her head was slightly atilt as if she were listening for a new overtone in the storm. “The feeling is not there. One can’t help one’s feelings.”

She hollowed her mouth and cocked her head. I could not hear over the uproar of the storm, but I knew her tongue went tock tock against the roof of her mouth.

Something worked in the pit of my stomach. It took hold and caught. I realized it was the drug catching on, meshing into my body like a gear.

She swung around to face me, hands on her hips. Holding herself erect, she set one foot forward and turned slightly out. Her face was severe, unpainted, Scandinavian. Christ, she was already Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House.

“What are you going to do, Margot?” I asked dreamily.

“What am I going to do?” Tock tock. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing I can’t do. I can’t just sit here year in and year out waxing furniture and watching the camellias bloom. You can understand that.”

“Sure. Then let’s go to — ah, Virginia.”

“Virginia?” Her face strayed two degrees toward me.

“I don’t know why I said Virginia,” I said, feeling an odd not unpleasant distance opening in my head. “If not Virginia, then anywhere you please.”

“No. I’m sorry, sweetie.” She kissed and hugged me absentmindedly. In the hug I could feel that her diaphragm was held high. She was breathing in a certain way. She was being Nora.

The drug was acting. A certain distance set in between me and myself. Here’s what I hoped for from the pills: a little space between me and the pain. I understood what Margot said but I couldn’t stand it. But how do you live with something you can’t stand? How do you get comfortable with a sword through your guts? I didn’t expect a solution or even relief. I only wanted a little distance: how does one live with it — the way a drunk lives with being a drunk, or a crook lives with being a crook? No problem! I envied both. But this! How do you live with this: being stuck onto pain like a cockroach impaled on a pin? The drug did this: before, I was part of the pain, there was no getting away from it. Now I had some distance. The pain was still there, but I stood off a ways. It became a problem to be solved. Hm, what to do about the pain? Who knows, there might even be a solution. Perhaps there’s something you can do to ease it. Let’s see.

“Why don’t you come up to the belvedere with us? It is absolutely spectacular.”

“No. There’re some things I have to do.”

“Very well.” She kissed me distractedly with a loud kinfolks kiss, smack. Tock tock.

When I finished locking the shutters, I returned to the pigeonnier. One had to lean into the south wind. There was wind between the gusts. The storm was like a man who can’t get his breath.

The space between me and myself widened. I was sitting in my plantation rocker feeling a widening in my head.

The next thing I knew I was still sitting in my rocker. It was moonlight outside. The moonlight was coming in. I got up and opened the door. It was still. An orange moon rose behind the English Coast. A great yellow rampart of cloud filled the western sky beyond the levee. It looked as solid as the Andes and had peaks and valleys and glaciers and crevasses.

Leaving the door open, I went inside and sat in the rocker and thought of nothing. I breathed. My eye followed the line between the moonlight and the shadow of the doorjamb which ran across the floor of St. Joseph bricks set in a herringbone pattern.

OUR LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS

I must have dozed off because the next thing I remember was the certain sense that there was someone in the room with me. No mystery: I was looking straight at her. Therefore I must have dozed or I would have seen this person come in. But the interval must have been very short because the angle of moonlight lying across the bricks had not changed.

There in the straight chair across the desk from me sat a woman I seemed to know, or at least seemed to be expected to know. She knew me. I started guiltily, smiled, and nodded to cover my lapse of manners. Christ, you remember, Percival; there must have been forty women in that parish of a certain age who look more or less alike, who have a certain connection with one’s family, but whose names one never gets straight. They are neither old nor young. They could be thirty-five or fifty-five. They look the same for thirty years. Was this Miss Irma or Cousin Callie or Mrs. Jenny James? They are dark-complexioned, have full figures and a certain reputation from the past. Something had happened to them but we did not speak of it — one’s father had got them out of trouble. Oh, you remember what happened to Callie. Perhaps she had run off with an older married man. For the next forty years they do well enough. Often they hold down a small political job at the courthouse, or sell Tupperware — perhaps Cousin Callie has been Judge Jones’s mistress for twenty years. At any rate, they outlive everybody. They are healthy. They show up at funerals, weddings, and New Year open houses. One can’t imagine what they do between times.

The only thing I could be certain of was that this person seemed to have every right to be there in my pigeonnier.

And that she knew me and I was expected to know her. She smiled at me with perfect familiarity. No doubt she had come to seek shelter from the hurricane at Belle Isle, the strongest building hereabouts.

She sat bolt upright yet gracefully, smoothing down her dress into her waist, showing her figure to good effect. It was a knit dress which perfectly fitted her full breasts and hips.

Now she arched her back and sat even more bolt upright. It would never have occurred to me to ask: “Who are you and what do you want?”

Her hair was dark, perhaps a bit gray, heavy, long, and looped around her head in a not unattractive way. It had not been recently washed. I caught a whiff, not unpleasant, of unwashed woman’s hair.

I looked at her. She smiled at me, a winning smile, but her eyes glittered. She was the sort of woman, Percival, you remember from childhood, who was extraordinarily nice to you, who spoke well of your parents, who said how nice they were, how handsome you were. Yet at the mention of her name your parents exchanged glances and fell silent.

She was also the sort you might well remember if you remember how a voluptuous forty-year-old woman attracted a fifteen-year-old youth, how if we were playing football and lounging on the grass at a time-out, sweaty, tired, and cheerfully obscene, and she passed by in the street, erect, heavy in the thigh and small in the waist, we’d fall silent until the inevitable: How would you like some of that?

Then I noticed the camellia pinned at her shoulder — and at the same moment it came to me that this was not yet the season for camellias — a large open flesh-colored bloom with a sheaf of stalks sprouting from the center bearing stamens, pistils, pollen, pods, ovules.

She was real enough, I think, though I cannot explain the camellia. The slight embarrassment of not being able to remember her name was all too familiar and not like a dream. She’d come for shelter, she said (doesn’t this prove she was real, in dreams explanations are not required), but she’d changed her mind. She didn’t want to impose on us. Maybe she’d better stay with a relative in town, Cousin Maybelle.

But where did she get the camellia?

She still spoke well of everyone. “Your father was such a perfect gentleman. What perfect tact and understanding!”

“Understanding?”

“Of Lily. Your mother. Oh, Lily. What a lovely delicate creature. Like a little dove. Not like me. I’m more a sparrow. Plain but tough.”

“A dove?”

“Maybe more like a lovebird. She lived for love. Literally. Unless she was loved, she withered and died. Maury understood that. God, what understanding he had! And he also understood his own limitations and accepted them. He understood her relationship with Harry and accepted that. That man was a saint.”

“What was her relationship with Harry?”

“You’re joking. La, it was not secret.”

“They were lovers?”

“For years. Everybody knew. So romantic! They were like Camille and Robert Taylor.”

Everybody but me. Does everybody know everything but me?

“That was after my father’s — uh — indictment?”

“Yes. Poor Maury was crushed, even though it was all just dirty politics and nothing was proved. I’ve always thought his illness had something to do with what he thought of as his disgrace. Pooh, men are ridiculous. And he was too — tenderhearted. But so aristocratic!”

I was looking in my father’s sock drawer for the small change he kept in the fitted scoops for collar buttons and caught sight of something under the argyle socks. There it was, the ten thousand dollars, dusky new green bills in a powdered rubber band neat and squared away like a book, and there it was, the sweet heart pang of horror. I counted it. The bills felt like stiff petals, not like paper, like leaves covered by pollen. My heart beats slowly and strongly. Strange: I was aware that my eyes were doing more than seeing, that they were unblinking and staring and slightly bulging. They were “taking it in,” that is, devouring. For here was the sweet shameful heart of something, the secret. For minutes there was an awareness of my eyes devouring the money under the socks, making little scanning motions to and fro, the way the eye takes in a great painting. Dishonor is sweeter and more mysterious than honor. It holds a secret. There is no secret in honor. If one could but discover the secret at the heart of dishonor. …

Harry Wills was undressing, taking off his duke’s costume in the auditorium locker room after the ball. There was the usual drinking and horsing and laughing. No Robert Taylor, he was oldish, blue-jowled, big-nosed, hairy-chested, strong-bellied, thin-shanked, not a Realsilk salesman any more but a Schenley distributor: a traveling salesman! Wet rings from the glass of whiskey shimmered on the bench beside him. Except for his green satin helmet, sword sash, and red leatherette hip boots, he was naked. His genital was retracted, a large button over a great veined ball. As he caught sight of me, I watched him, gazed into his eyes, and saw his brain make two sluggish connections. One was: Here I was, a young Comus knight, the very one who had run 110 yards against Alabama. The other: here was I also, the son of Lily. (Jesus, was I also his son?) The two revelations fused in a single great rosy Four Roses whiskey glow of fondness, perhaps love. (A father’s love?) Rising unsteadily, he grabbed me around the neck and announced to the krewe: “You know who this is! This is Lancelot Lamar and you know what he did!” They knew and their knowing confirmed the terrible emotion swelling within him. He told them anyway. “This boy not only ran back that punt 110 yards. He was hit at least once by every man on the Alabama team — twice by some. Haven’t y’all seen the film?” The other dukes nodded solemnly. They had. They drank and gave me a drink and shook my hand. Hugging my neck, Harry sat down, pulling me down into a heavy air of lung-breathed bourbon, cigarette smoke, and genital musk.

“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head at the wonder of it and cursed from the very inchoateness of the terrible unnamed feeling. “Have a drink! Goddamn …!”

Do you remember my mother? I never thought of her as “beautiful” or “good-looking” but rather as too pale, with wide winged unplucked eyebrows which gave her a boy’s look. You thought she was beautiful? Perhaps I don’t remember her after she began to drink. Later she became sly and even a little voluptuous. After years of secret drinking, there came to be a tightness and glossiness about her face. Her chin receded a little. Her eyes became brilliant and opaque and mischievous as if she knew a joke on everybody. You know, I’ve since known several genteel lady drunks who develop this same glossy chinless look. Is that a facial syndrome of woman alcoholics? Or a certain kind of unhappy Southern lady? Or both?

I remember her earlier not as “beautiful” but as thin-boned, quick, and sporty. There was a kind of nervous joking aggressiveness about her. She liked to “get” me. On cold mornings when everyone was solemn and depressed about getting up and going off to work or school, she would say, “I’m going to get you,” and come at me with her sharp little fist boring away into my ribs. There was something past joking, an insistence, about the boring. She wouldn’t stop.

Uncle Harry, jovial Schenley salesman and third cousin once removed, family friend and benefactor who brought me presents — even presents on ordinary weekdays, imagine a glass pistol loaded with candy on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon or a Swiss army knife with twenty-two blades — who was not only nice to me but took Lily, who was delicate then and had to rest a lot, for “joyrides” to False River—“Get her out of the house, Harry!” my father said — leaving him, my father, to his beloved quiet. Once he, my father, painted a mystical painting of our alley of live oaks showing the perpetual twilight filling them even at noon, and above, great domed spaces shot through by a single stray shaft of sunlight, a picture he entitled “O sola beatitudo! O beata solitudo!” He wrote a poem with the same title. Poet Laureate he was of Feliciana Parish, so designated by the local Kiwanis, lying on his recliner on the deep shaded upper gallery dreaming over his history manuscript, dreaming not so much of a real past as what ought to have been and should be now and might be yet: a lovely golden sunlit Louisiana of bayous and live oaks and misty green savannahs, Feliciana, a happy land of decent folk and droll folkways and quiet backwaters, the whole suffused by gentle Episcopal rectitude.

Uncle Harry then and Lily entering a tourist cabin on False River of a sunny wintry afternoon, the frost-bleached levee outside, the raw soughing gas heat striking at leg and eyes, the gracious cold still trapped in Lily’s fur, the sheets slick-cold and sour.

But now, in the pigeonnier and in the eye of the storm, the sense at last of coming close to it, the sweet secret of evil, the dread exhilaration, the sure slight heart-quickening sense of coming onto something, the dear darling heart of darkness — ah, this was where it was all right.

You always got it backward: you don’t set out looking for clues to God’s existence, nobody’s ever found anything that way, least of all God. From the beginning you and I were different. You were obsessed with God. I was obsessed with — what? dusky new graygreen money under interwoven argyle socks? Uncle Harry and Lily in the linoleum-cold gas-heat-hot tourist cabin?

The rising moon grew brighter and smaller. The great bastion of cloud wheeled slowly. Andes peaks and mesas and glaciers revolved slowly past my window. My mouth was open. I became aware of a difficulty in breathing as if I had asthma. I don’t have asthma. I looked at my Abercrombie & Fitch desk weatherstation, Christmas present from Margot. The barometer read 28.96. I went to the open door. Children and youths in their teens were playing in the bright moonlight on the levee. They were exhilarated by the stillness of the great wheeling storm. Some worked seriously on the bonfires, adding willow logs and rubber tires to make smoke. Some somersaulted or lay flat and rolled down the levee. A young girl in a long white dress danced alone a French version of the square dance, a Fais do-do, mincing forward and backward, holding her head first to one side then to the other, curtsying, her hands spreading wide the folds of her skirt. Their cries came to me through the thin dead air, muffled and faraway. I became aware that it was the girl’s voice. She was singing. Her voice carried in the hushed air. It was an old Cajun tune I used to hear at Breaux Bridge.

Mouton, mouton — et où vas tu?

A l’abatoire.

Quand tu reviens?

Jamais — Baa!

That was curious. There were no Cajun families here on the English Coast, only a few light-colored Negroes with French names, whom we called freejacks because they were said to have been freed by General Jackson for services rendered in the Battle of New Orleans.

Where did she come from?

In 1862 my great-great-grandfather Manson Maury Lamar, infantry captain with the 14^th Virginia, struck up the Shenandoah Valley in A. P. Hill’s corps, which invested Harper’s Ferry, took thirteen thousand prisoners, got news of McClellan’s assault on Lee at Sharpsburg seventeen miles away, hit a jog for the seventeen miles, and arrived just as Lee’s right was giving way, took his company into battle at a dead run. It was the bloodiest day of the war. He would never talk about it, they said. But he would also never talk about anything else. He said nothing. My uncle fought in the Argonne. He said it was too horrible. But he also said he never again felt real for the next forty years.

My son refused to go to Vietnam, went underground instead in New Orleans, lived in an old streetcar, wrote poetry, and made various sorts of love. Was he right, or was I right, or are you right?

I went to see Anna this morning. We spoke. She sat in a chair. She’s going to be all right. She speaks slowly and in a monotone, choosing her words carefully like someone recovering from a stroke. But she’s going to be all right. She had combed her hair and wore a skirt and sat on her foot and pulled her skirt over her knee like a proper Georgia girl. I told her I would be leaving the hospital soon and asked her to come with me.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“I see.”

After a while she said: “And you want me to come with you.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t that enough? I want you to come with me.”

“Do you love me?”

“I’m not sure what that means. But I need you and you need me. I will have Siobhan with me.”

“I see.” She seemed to know all about Siobhan. Did you tell her? She nodded. “A new family. A new life.”

That’s all she said. She kept on nodding. But I wasn’t sure she was listening. Do you think she meant she would come?

Do you hear the sound of music faraway? No? Perhaps I only imagined it, no doubt it is the echo of a dream or rather a vision which has come to me of late. But I swear I could hear the sound of young men marching and singing, a joyful cadenced marching song. A Mardi Gras marching band over on St. Charles? No. You’re right, it’s November, nowhere near Mardi Gras. Besides, it wasn’t like a high-school band. It was young men singing and marching. It was both a great deal more serious and joyful than a high-school band.

Anna got bad news today. Her father died of a heart attack. Now she like me is alone in the world. He left her nothing but a cabin and a barn and fifty acres in the Blue Ridge not far from Lexington, Virginia. Well, that settles it. No Big Sur after all and perhaps it’s just as well. In fact it is a kind of sign. It is Virginia where we’re supposed to be. I see that clearly now.

Virginia?

Yes, don’t you see? Virginia is where it will begin. And it is where there are men who will do it. Just as it was Virginia where it all began in the beginning, or at least where the men were to conceive it, the great Revolution, fought it, won it, and saw it on its way. They began the Second Revolution and we lost it. Perhaps the Third Revolution will end differently.

It won’t be California after all. It will be settled in Virginia, where it started.

Virginia!

Don’t you see? Virginia is neither North nor South but both and neither. Betwixt and between. An island between two disasters. Facing both; both the defunct befouled and collapsing North and the corrupt thriving and Jesus-hollering South. The Northerner is at heart a pornographer. He is an abstract mind with a genital attached. His soul is at Harvard, a large abstract locked-in sterile university whose motto is truth but which has not discovered an important truth in a hundred years. His body lives on Forty-second Street. Do you think there is no relation between Harvard and Forty-second Street? One is the backside of the other. The Southerner? The Southerner started out a skeptical Jeffersonian and became a crooked Christian. That is to say, he is approaching and has almost reached his essence, which is to be more crooked and Christian than ever before. Do you want a portrait of the New Southerner? He is Billy Graham on Sunday and Richard Nixon the rest of the week. He calls on Jesus and steals, he’s in business, he’s in politics. Everybody in Louisiana steals from everybody else. That is why the Mafia moved South: because the Mafia is happier with stealing than with pornography. The Mafia and the Teamsters will end by owning the South, the pornographers will own the North, movies, books, plays, the works, and everybody will live happily ever after.

California? The West? That’s where the two intersect: Billy Graham, Richard Nixon, Las Vegas, drugs, pornography, and every abstract discarnate idea ever hit upon by man roaming the wilderness in search of habitation.

Washington, the country, is down the drain. Everyone knows it. The people have lost it to the politicians, bureaucrats, drunk Congressmen, lying Presidents, White House preachers, C.I.A., F.B.I., Mafia, Pentagon, pornographers, muggers, buggers, bribers, bribe takers, rich crooked cowboys, sclerotic Southerners, rich crooked Yankees, dirty books, dirty movies, dirty plays, dirty talk shows, dirty soap operas, fags, lesbians, abortionists, Jesus shouters, anti-Jesus shouters, dying cities, dying schools, courses in how to fuck for schoolchildren.

The Virginian? He may not realize it yet, but he is the last hope of the Third Revolution. The First Revolution was won at Yorktown. The Second Revolution was lost at Appomattox. The Third Revolution will begin there, in the Shenandoah Valley.

Now I remember where I heard the music. Do you believe in dreams? That is, do you believe that a dream can be prophetic? You smile. Christ, don’t you believe anything any more? You smile. Your God used to send messages in dreams, didn’t he? No, this was not a message sent to me by God but my own certain vision of what is going to happen. I know what is going to happen. I dreamed it, but it is also going to happen.

A young man is standing in a mountain pass above the Shenandoah Valley. A rifle is slung across his back. He is very tan. Clearly he has been living in the forest. Though the day is very hot, he stands perfectly still under a sour-wood tree as the sun sets in the west. He is waiting and watching for something. What? A sign? Who, what is he? WASP Virginian? New England Irish? Louisiana Creole? Jew? Black? Where does he live? It is impossible to say. He is dark, burned black as an Indian. He could be a Sabra from a kibbutz. All one can say for certain is that he is careful, that he has something in mind, and that he is watching and waiting. For what? For this: presently he sees something, a mirror flash from the last sun rays from the mountain across the North Fork. Still he waits. The sun goes down. Quickly it grows dark. He faces northeast watching the faint green luminescence from the great dying cities of the North, Washington to Boston.

As quickly as he appeared, he vanishes.

Presently there comes a sound from faraway of young men singing. There is a cadence and a dying away to the sound. Are they marching?

Oh Shenandoah, we long to see you

How we love your sparkling water

And we love your lovely daughters

From these green hills to far away

Across the wide Missouri

Oh, Columbia, our blessed mother

You know we wait until you guide us

Give us a sign and march beside us

From these green hills to far away

Across the wide Missouri.

What? What about the women?

Women? How will it be for women?

In order to understand that, you must first understand the strange thing that happened to the human race. It is an event which you people had an inkling of but then turned upside down and inside out for your own purposes.

It is the secret of life, the most astounding and best-kept secret of the ages, yet it is as plain as the nose on your face, there for all to see.

You were onto it with your doctrine of Original Sin. But you got it exactly backwards. Original Sin is not something man did to God but something God did to man, so monstrous that to this day man cannot understand what happened to him. He shakes his head groggily and rubs his eyes in disbelief.

The great secret of the ages is that man has evolved, is born, lives, and dies for one end and one end only: to commit a sexual assault on another human or to submit to such an assault.

Everything else man does is so much bushwa and you know it and I know it and everybody knows it.

Women have only just now discovered the secret, or part of it, the monstrous absurdity of it. Can you blame them for being outraged? Yet even more absurd are their pathetic attempts, once having made the discovery which men are too dumb to make, to pretend it isn’t so, to cover it up, or to blame it on men.

What the poor dears discovered is the monstrous truth lying at the very center of life: that their happiness and the meaning of life is to be assaulted by a man.

Ah, sweet mystery of life indeed, indeed yes, exactly, yes indeed that is what it is: to be rammed, jammed, stuck, stabbed, pinned, impaled, run through, in a word:

Raped.

The meaning and goal and omega point of evolution is at last clear. It was obscured in past ages by the servitude of man. The poor bastard was so busy surviving and mainly not surviving, starving and dying, that only recently has it dawned on him what an extraordinary apparatus he is. He was decent because he was overworked.

Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.

Why do you look at me like that? After all, the facts are elementary. They are as every biology student knows: of the three million species on earth the human female is the only one capable of living in a state of constant estrus; of having an orgasm; of making love face to face with her mate.

Ha, it’s funny in a way, women liberated and educated, free at last to learn the truth, and the truth? That she is the only creature on earth in perpetual heat. What a discovery! That she is good for only one thing.

Eye to eye, face to face, belly to belly, breast to breast, day in and day out, in heat the year round — there is the omega point of evolution! A comedy isn’t it, women trying to escape that? That’s like a hen wanting to be a hawk. A lioness, yes, a lioness can do it, for she is a lion most of the time, fighter and hunter, and only periodically hikes her tail.

But a woman? She is your omega point. Take such a species, the human, give it a two-hour work week and a life expectancy of a hundred years and it doesn’t take a genius to see what God has in mind for man.

What hath God wrought? Hm yes.

Suddenly things became clear. The pornography of American life is not the work of evil men. No, it is the sensible work of clever men who have at last fathomed God’s design for man.

By the way, it is not true that Americans are by nature the most pornographic people on earth. The Russians and the Chinese are simply behind times, busy catching up. Ha, wait till those buggers get the forty-hour week.

THE GREAT SECRET OF LIFE

God’s secret design for man is that man’s happiness lies for men in men practicing violence upon women and that woman’s happiness lies in submitting to it.

The secret of life is violence and rape, and its gospel is pornography. The question is, Can we bear to discover the secret?

Do we have to accept the verdict of evolution, that the omega point is sexual aggression, the giving of it or the taking of it?

The Jews in the Old Testament knew the secret: that man is conceived in sin.

Then what shall we do about it?

You say we are redeemed. Look out there. Does it look like we are redeemed?

The storm? You don’t like my theology. I see. Oh, you want to know what happened that night. Yes. Well, I can tell you that quickly. It doesn’t really matter now.

When I woke, the eye had passed and the south wall slammed in with what must have been a line of tornadoes. Under the rising keening of the wind came a new sound as of a thousand diesel towboats rumbling down the river. Wind whistled through the holes of the pigeonnier like an organ loft. In a flash of lightning I saw Belle Isle. The oaks were turned inside out, white as birches, but Belle Isle stood steady and serene. I thought of the heavy old fourteen-inch attic timbers straining and creaking against their iron straps and bolts.

The woman was still there. She stood up. I noticed without much interest that she looked different. Now she looked less like an obscure relative, a voluptuous middle-aged aunt who has survived some forgotten disgrace, than — my mother! Or rather a photograph of my mother which I remember studying as a child. She gazed at me with a mild, equable, even a slightly puckish expression. The snapshot showed some V.M.I, cadets and their dates grouped around, sitting in, leaning on, a 1925 Franklin touring car. It was after graduation and a military wedding. The bride and groom are facing the photographer. She wears a loose-fitting dress which comes exactly to her kneecaps and a wide lace collar. Her hair falls to her shoulders, where it curls up. The other girls’ mouths are painted in bows but my mother’s mouth is pale. Her wide brows are unplucked. In her prankish way she is proferring an unsheathed sword (her date’s? the groom’s?) to the photographer. The sword is upright, the blade held in her hands, the hand guard making a cross. Is she doing an imitation of Joan of Arc leading her army, cross borne aloft? Whenever my mother’s friends spoke of her, they used words like “wonderful sense of humor,” the “class clown.” “imp,” and so on. She had two close friends. They called themselves the three Musketeers.

The woman stood. It was the same woman. She was saying something, her lips were moving, but in the storm I could not hear her. Her expression meant something routine and self-deprecating like: Thank you so much, but I don’t want to be a bother. She turned and tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t open. It was then she gave me the sword—

The sword? Ha ha. It was the Bowie knife.

Then she looked like my mother again, and when she gave me the Bowie knife, she picked it up from the desk and thrust it at me point first in the same insistent joking way my mother would bore her sharp fist into my ribs.

Again she tried to open the door. It must be the wind, I thought, holding it shut. But when I tried to open it. I saw that an oak limb, a thicket of leaves and branches, had blown against it.

Ah, she gave me the knife to cut the branches and free the door.

You can’t go now, I yelled above the shriek of the wind and the roar of the diesels on the river. Her shrug and nod I took to mean: Very well, I’ll stay at Belle Isle.

Very well, I’ll take you over. But then I thought of something. No, you stay here, it’s safer, there are fewer trees and it’s safer here under the levee.

Yet all the while I was doing what she asked me to do, in the obliging way, you know, that you do something when Miss So-and-So asks you to, trying to open the door, my face down and getting my shoulder into it.

I’m sorry, I said, but—

But when I stood up, she was gone. Not wanting to be a bother, she must have stepped past me.

I was standing, thinking, and looking down at the knife in my hand. It was three o’clock. There was an orange cannonade of lightning in the southern sky but you couldn’t hear the thunder. As I watched, the last bonfire blew away, a very strong symmetrical one built of heavy notched willows like a log cabin, tapering to a point, the four corners secured by thirty-foot tree trunks as straight as telephone poles. It blew away, exploded silently and slowly, the timber springing apart like a toothpick toy.

I was sitting at my desk fiddling with the knife. My head felt light and there was the feeling of freedom you have when you recover from a high fever. It is possible, one realizes, to stand up, walk in any direction, and do anything. Did the sensation have something to do with the low pressure? The barometer Margot gave me now read 27.65 inches. That’s very low, I thought, as I fiddled with the pencil. No wonder I felt queer.

Presently I got up and found a hunting coat with big side pockets and a pouch in the back for game. I put a flashlight in the side pocket. By opening the door a few inches, it was possible to use the knife as a machete and hack through the oak branch sprung against the door. How did the woman get out? The knife flashed gold in the lightning. I felt its edge. It was sharp as a razor. Who had sharpened it? I looked at the knife and put it in the game pouch of the hunting coat, the point of the blade stuck down in a comer, and tied the drawstring tight across the flat of the blade.

I stepped outside. The noise was bad but the wind was not bad until I reached the corner of the pigeonnier. Then it blew my mouth open, hollowed out my cheek, and made a sound across my mouth as if I were shouting. I fell down. Above me I could hear the organ sounds of the wind in the holes of the loft. The glazing must have blown out. After several tries at getting up, I discovered it was possible to walk by turning sideways to the wind and planting a foot forward. It was like walking down a steep mountain. Something was cutting my cheek. It must have been rain because it was not cold. My mouth blew open and again I fell down but managed to crawl into the lee of a big oak stump. I didn’t remember the stump. The keening and roaring was not a sound any more. It had turned into a lack of pressure, a vacuum, a silence. I sat in the roaring silence for a while. The stump was tall. I didn’t remember the tree. It must have been one of the oaks in the alley. It looked as if it had been sheared off fifteen feet above the ground by an artillery shell. I turned on my flashlight and looked at the sign in the tourist parking area, ADMISSION $5.00. A pine needle had blown through it. I sat for some seconds trying to understand the physics of it, how a limber pine needle can blow through a board.

The doors to the cellar were on the north lee side of the house, so it was possible to open one. I went down into the darkness, not using the flashlight at first. The two-foot brick walls were like earthworks. The storm died suddenly to a muted uproar, a long steady exhalation. But there was another sound, a creaking and groaning, like the timbers of a ship in a heavy sea. I realized it was the fourteen-by-fourteens in the attic far above.

Walking slowly toward the Christmas tree, I felt with my foot for the recess. When I reached it. I sat on the edge of the concrete and waited, hoping that dark as it was I might still be able to see something. After a while it became possible to make out a glimmer of pipes against the dark. Standing, I felt for the top pressure gauge and held the flashlight close to it. It read 38 PSI. I closed the valve below it watching the needle fall to zero. I propped the flashlight, slanted up, in the wheel of the bypass valve. The big Stillson wrench wouldn’t move the gauge at first. I was afraid of breaking it off but finally I was able to get a purchase on the fitting below the gauge. It took all I had to start it. When it came off, I tried the three-inch Gerona nipple. That was the trouble. Naturally the plastic nipple didn’t fit the threaded metal sleeve but simply abutted it. The Gerona pipe could not be threaded so there was nothing to do but make a crude abutted joint and seal it as best I could with PBC compound and many wrappings of duct tape. A bad job but it should hold against the low pressure.

The rest was simple: a ninety-degree elbow and three ten-foot sections of the Gerona which reached to within a foot of the main intake duct of the new fifteen-ton Carrier. Using the Bowie knife, I sliced off fiberglass insulation until metal showed. Then, using it like a chisel and the Stillson as a hammer, I made an X in the sheet metal and bent the corners in. Then drive a nipple into the opening — take care not to lose it! — and connect it with the Gerona system with a sleeve and another nipple. Slice off more fiberglass, pack it into the crude joint, seal with compound, and wrap the whole with the rest of the duct tape, perhaps fifty feet or so. The difficulty was propping the flashlight at the right angle.

How strange memory is! Do you know what my memory records as the most unpleasant experience of that night? The damn fiberglass. Particles of it worked under my sleeve and collar. It makes my neck and arms itch just to think of it. Death’s banal, but fiberglass in the neck is serious business.

I switched off the light and sat leaning back against the chimney gazing up into the darkness and waited for the compound to set.

Then I opened the valve. The gas made no sound in the pipe. At least I could not hear it, but I fancied I could feel a slight shudder in the ten-foot sections of Gerona. Naturally there was no smell because the captan which gives house gas its characteristic odor had not been added.

Sticking the knife and flashlight back in my hunting coat, I picked up the two kerosene lamps and went upstairs in the dark.

At the top of the hanging staircase in the upper hall it was pitch black. But I knew every inch. A foot or so (I reckoned) from the cathedral chair I set down the kerosene lamps and put out my hand — yes, it was there, the chair. I listened. There was no sound but the murmur of the storm and the creak and pop of the timbers in the attic, as if Belle Isle were laboring through heavy seas. Somewhere a window glass broke. There was no sound from the bedrooms.

I went to each door, Troy’s Margot’s, Raine’s. At Raine’s door there was a different kind of murmuring, an overtone to the storm. A weak watery light flowed through the crack in the door.

I felt along the wall until I touched the air-conditioning register. My hand felt nothing, but when I put my face against it, there was a cool breath against my cheek. There was no odor. It could have been air.

For a long time I stood at Raine’s door. I can’t remember whether I was listening or thinking or doing nothing. What I remember is that it was possible to stand there at least twenty minutes, hands at my sides, without fatigue, registering the sensations of my body. My heart was beating slowly, my breathing was deeper than usual — was it the low pressure of the storm? The storm roared softly like a conch shell over my ear. The fiberglass was beginning to bother my neck.

Then, taking some thirty seconds to do so, I opened the door. So well did I know every inch and quirk of Belle Isle that without thinking I put a slight strain upwards on the silver doorknob while turning it because the heavy door had settled on its hinges and the latch did not move easily.

The door opened at the rate perhaps of an inch every five seconds. The first thing that came into view was the curio cabinet next to the iron fireplace, then a corner of the bed. The light probably came from an electric camp lantern set on the floor. The weak light seemed to radiate in rays, like a child’s drawing of light.

Once several years ago, passing in the hall, I heard Elgin in this bedroom conducting a tour, eight or ten Michiganers. “This cabinet was sealed up before the Civil War.” There was a marvel about it which Elgin saw and the tourists liked and I hadn’t thought of, this small volume of 1850 air trapped and sealed in glass. Elgin had a sense of the legendary. “These little bilbos you see still have General Beauregard’s fingerprints on them.” Bilbos? Where did he get that? He must have meant bibelots, the little bric-a-brac figures.

The door was opening without a noise. Or if there was a noise, it could not be heard. The storm beyond the shuttered widow was like a heavy surf.

There was the Ray-O-Vac lantern, not on the floor but on the bedtable, shedding a small cone of rayed light.

Troy Dana was lying prone on the far edge of the bed, naked, his face buried in the pillow.

Raine was standing at the window, even though the shutters were closed and locked. Lightning made yellow stripes through the slots. She wore a short hip-length nightgown — shift? — which left her legs bare. Her legs were short but well developed. She looked like a fourteen-year-old girl who had spent twelve years dancing.

Appearing silently beside her. I thought to startle her, but she turned to me as if I had always been there.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

“What?”

“The hurricane.”

“Yes.” All one could see through the shutters were the heaving and whitened oaks.

“Look at that faggot. Passed out. OD’d. In this lovely hurricane.”

“Will he be all right?”

“Oh sure, unfortunately.”

I saw too that she was drunk with something not alcohol. Her face was close under mine and her breath had a sweet chemical smell. Her voice was not slurred but low and bell-like. Her eyes winked gold in the lightning. The only sign of intoxication was her incapacity for surprise. Whatever happened was the occasion of a mild disconnected wonder, my appearing — or General Beauregard appearing.

“You didn’t know that I went for you?”

“What?” I said, cocking my ear away from the storm.

“You know, like going for somebody.”

“You did?”

“You’re so dumb! And with all that going on—” She waved vaguely toward the hall (by no means drunk or even swaying, but mainly flat and unsurprised: for her one thing was more or less like any other, and could be spoken of in her low bell-like voice).

She put her hands on my belt buckle, grabbed it with her fingers stuck inside, and gave me an odd little jostle.

“Couldn’t you tell?”

“Tell what?” I gazed into her gold eyes.

Her mild gold gaze drifted indifferently from me to Troy to the hurricane.

“My God, isn’t that something.” Through the shutters I could see a big white socket where a limb had been ripped off one of the oaks. “Does it turn you on?”

“To what?”

“Me,” she said like a drowsy little temple bell. She put her arms around my waist, locked her hands, and squeezed me with surprising strength. “You’re a big mother.”

I pulled her up to me. She was like a child, but broader, a broad child.

“Let’s lie down,” she said, tugging fretfully at my buckle. “I’m sleepy.”

“Go on,” I said absently. I remembered something I had to do. “I remember something I have to do.”

“What are you doing?” she asked from the bed.

“I don’t like this light,” I said, picking up the Ray-O-Vac, which was shooting out weak white rays. The kerosene lamp was on the floor.

“Oh, a coal oil lamp!” Lying in bed, she clapped her hands slowly and without noise. “But hurry up.”

Before lighting it, I checked the air-conditioning register. It was set high in the wall. My hand could reach it but I couldn’t feel the gas. The cheek is more sensitive. I sat in the corner opposite the register and removed the glass chimney of the lamp and took out a match. I gazed up into the dimness of the fourteen-foot ceiling. Cold air falls. Methane rises. I struck the match. Nothing happened. I lit the wick and replaced the glass chimney and switched off the Ray-O-Vac. The soft yellow light opened like a flower and filled the room.

Raine’s lips formed a word. She beckoned to me.

Time passed but it was hard to tell how slow or fast. I was standing by the bed looking down at her. She beckoned and said something. I dropped to one knee beside the bed to hear her. The pillow mashed her lips sideways like a child’s.

Something occurred to me. Do you think it could be true that in our heart of hearts we always know what is going to happen to us? Not only does a person dying in a hospital know perfectly well he is going to die even though he may not know what he knows. Not only that but even a passenger on an airplane that is about to blow up somehow knows in a part of his being what is going to happen.

Anyhow she knew. That is, she knew something.

She was talking about her childhood. The kerosene lamp reminded her of growing up in West Virginia. Her father was a drunk ex-coal miner with black lung. Her mother took to staying out late at night with men, leaving her with the other children. She was fourteen. She thought her mother was taking money from the men. Her mother was. She hated her mother. But her mother was doing it to buy Raine her first party dress, a “basic black” with “classic opera pumps.”

“Here’s the funny thing,” said Raine through her famous but now mashed lips, not caring how she looked, gazing at the flame in the chimney which I could see upside down in her pupil. “You would have thought I’d be grateful. Let me tell you something. Gratitude is shit. You know what I was? Happy. That’s all. And that’s better. I was happy to have the dress. I didn’t care how she got it. But that was what she wanted: to see me happy. So all was well after all, wasn’t it? I was happy and she was happy to see me happy.”

Time seemed to pass both slowly and jerkily. Or maybe that’s the way I remember it.

“Come here,” said Raine.

I was standing over her. She was lying prone, bare legs apart. One hand was stretched awkwardly behind her, fumbling for me. She touched me.

I remember thinking: Why is the real so different from fantasy? Do you remember our locker-room fantasies? How would you like to have Ava Gardner here and now on this rainy day, in this gym, the gym cleared out, nobody but you and Ava on the janitor’s cot in the boiler room, and so forth. But a hurricane is even better, and there was Raine Robinette herself, groping for me, her famous lips mashed against the pillow, her famous thighs under me. And alone with her, or as good as alone, maybe even better: Troy there but out of it, curled up on the very edge of Lucy’s queen-size rosewood tester.

And I? I was sitting gazing down at her, my thumbnail against my teeth, thinking of the queerness of the present here-and-now moment. Other times belong to someone or something or oneself and smell of someone or something or oneself. The present is something else. To live in the past and future is easy. To live in the present is like threading a needle. It came to me: our great locker-room lust had no relation to the present. Lust is a function of the future.

Now her hand, knowledgeable even though stretched awkwardly behind her and upside down, was touching me. I was watching her, thumbnail against tooth, gazing at nothing in particular.

No, not at nothing. At something. Something winked on a finger of the groping hand. It was the blue sapphire in Lucy’s ring. Raine was wearing my daughter Lucy’s Tri-Phi sorority ring. It was loose on Raine’s middle finger. Raine wore it the way a girl wears a boy’s ring. Lucy had a big callow teen girl’s hand.

As I was gazing at the ring on the groping hand, I began to smile. My eyes focused and seemed to wink back at the ring. A little arrow of interest shot up my spine. I smiled and guided Raine’s hand to me. You know why I smiled, don’t you? No? Because I discovered the secret of love. It is hate. Or rather the possibility of hate. The possibility of hate rescued lust from the locker-room future and restored it to the present.

“Here now,” I said smiling, and tenderly pulling her body up, reaching around the front of her until my hands felt the soft crests of her pelvis.

“What?” she asked. “Oh.”

At first as her face was pressed into the pillow her lips were mashed down even more. I was alone, far above her, upright and smiling in the darkness.

Later she wanted to turn over. “Ah,” she said. We watched each other, her face turned and looking back, her eyes aslit and gleaming in the soft light. We were alone and watchful, that is, each of us was alone and watchful of the other. No longer children were we but adults and watchful, which comes of being adults. What had God in store for us? So it was this. For what comes of being adult was this probing her for her secret, the secret which I had to find out and she wanted me to find out. The Jews called it knowing and now I knew why. Every time I went deeper I knew her better. Soon I would know her secret. We were watching each other. We were going to know each other but one of us would know first and therefore win. The watching was a contest. I was coming close, closer. We watched each other watching. It was a contest. She lost. When I found it out, the secret, she closed her eyes and curled around me like a burning leaf.

I left her asleep next to Troy, the two nested like spoons.

The rest of it? What? Oh. Yes. Well, I’ll be brief. Do you mind if I summarize? There is no pleasure in dwelling on it. Anyway it happened almost as an afterthought. The whole business took no more than fifteen minutes.

I didn’t see what I wanted to see after all. What did I want to see? the money in my father’s sock drawer? Why was it so important for me to see them, Margot and Jacoby? What new sweet-horrid revelation did I expect to gain from witnessing what I already knew? Was it a kind of voyeurism? Or was it a desire to feel the lance strike home to the heart of the abscess and let the puss out? I still didn’t know. I knew only that it was necessary to know, to know only as the eyes know. The eyes have to know.

But I did not see them after all. I felt them.

I entered Margot’s bedroom, mine and Margot’s, that is. Somehow there seemed no great need for precautions now. Perhaps it was because the storm was at its height. There was a steady shrieking as if the hurricane were blowing through steel rigging. It was pitch dark. So I could not hear them or see them! Who was shrieking? they? the hurricane? both? Belle Isle groaned and labored. The great timbers sang and popped overhead. The lightning was less frequent now but brighter. I waited and counted during the intervals. The flashes came about eight or ten seconds apart.

The shrieking was so loud it seemed to make things invisible.

Now in the short foyer of the master bedroom I knelt and lit the second lamp, this time leaving the chimney off. I began to worry about leaving the chimney on the lamp in Raine’s room. I turned the wick low.

Standing straight against the wall of the foyer, I calculated I could see the reflection of the foot of the bed in the mirror of the huge crotch mahogany armoire which stood against the inside wall of the bedroom. I waited, perfectly still, back, head, palms of hands touching the cool plaster.

When the lightning flashed, striping the room through the shutters, I could see two bedposts striped like barber poles in the mirror even though the mirror was fogged by age, its silvering moth-eaten.

It was the great Calhoun bed, built by my ancestor for his friend John C. Calhoun to sleep in in the White House in 1844. But Calhoun never slept in the White House so Royal Moultrie Lamar kept the bed. It was like a cathedral, a Gothic bed, posts as thick as trees, carved and fluted and tapering to spires and gargoyles above the canopy. The headboard was as massive and complex as an altar screen. Panels of openwork braced posts and rails like flying buttresses.

Between flashes I walked without hurrying to the cul-de-sac between the armoire and the far wall. From here one looked directly at the top half of the bed. The shrieking grew worse but the lightning was a long time coming. It came, a short bright burst like a camera flashbulb. Something moved. But my view was obstructed by the triangular bracing between the post and the side rail.

Something white gleamed on the Aubusson rug at my feet. I picked it up. A handkerchief? No, a pair of jockey shorts. I gazed at it dreamily. There was something archaic about it, an ancient artifact it was. It was like finding a toilet article, a broken clay comb in one of the houses at Pompeii. I dropped it behind me and waited.

Presently the lightning stopped but the noise was so loud, a bass roaring and soprano shrieking, that it was palpable, a thickening and curdling of the darkness. It became natural to open one’s mouth to let the sound circulate, shriek into one’s ears and out the mouth. I felt invisible.

Then, though I don’t remember how I got there, I was standing by the bed looking down. There was nothing to see. Kneeling I put my ear to the openwork panel of the flying buttress, an unconsecrated priest hearing an impenitent confession. But presently, in a lull there was a voice. I could not make out the words but the voice rose and fell in a prayer-like intonation.

God. Sh— God. Sh—

In my confessional I fell to musing. Why does love require the absolute polarities of divinity-obscenity? I was right about love: it is an absolute and therefore beyond all categories. Who else but God arranged that love should pitch its tent in the place of excrement? Why not then curse and call on God in an act of love?

My eyes began to make things out. No darkness is absolute. The candle glow from the foyer made the faintest glimmer on the white walls. It was possible to make out the looming shape of the bed. I was standing. There was a shape on the bed. Its skin was darker than the white sheets. Now I could see it, the strangest of all beasts, two-backed and pied, light-skinned dark-skinned, striving against itself, holding discourse with itself in prayers and curses.

Ah men, was this God’s secret plan for us? (What did your Jewish Bible say about all men being conceived in sin?) A musing wonder filled me. I ran my thumbnail along my teeth.

My head ached, yet I felt very well, strong and light, though a bit giddy. My body seemed to float. Then I realized that the methane had come down. It had filled the high dim vault of the room and had come down close enough to breathe. At first I could not understand why my heart was beating fast and my breath labored, because I felt good. Then I understood. It was the methane. Standing, I was above them. It. I considered: it would be better to get lower and closer. It was dark.

Though I must have been leaning, I seemed to be floating over them. Jacoby’s back was a darkness within the dark. Musingly I touched it, the beast.

“Oh, yes,” it said.

A white thigh and knee angled out. I considered her, its, foot, the toes splayed and curled up — isn’t that called a Babinski sign, Doctor, Father, whatever you are? You know, I’d seen that before, the way her toes curled out and up. and had secretly thought of it as a sign of her common Irish or country-Texas origins or both. It seemed vulgar. I could remember my mother saying a lady always points her toes when she dances. Now my hand was exploring the white thigh, searched for and found what it already knew so well, the strap of fiber along the outside which bound the deep flesh above and below it. My fingers traced the fiber toward the knee, where it had a ribbed-silk texture.

“Ah,” said the beast.

Then lightly I let myself down on it, the beast. It was breathing hard and complexly, a counterpointed respiration. I was breathing hard too. The methane had reached the bed.

Suddenly it, the beast, went very quiet, all at once watchful and listening and headed up like a wildebeest catching a scent. Its succubus back, Margot’s, was still arched and I could barely reach around its thick waist and clasp my hands together.

Squeezed together, the beast tried to break apart.

“What in the—?” said Janos Jacoby.

“Oh my God,” said Margot, muffled, but instantly knowing everything.

Mashed together, the two were never more apart, never more themselves.

I was squeezing them, I think, and breathing hard but feeling very light and strong, so light that I imagined that if I had not held them I would float up to the ceiling. Do you remember how we discovered “red-outs,” how if you squeezed somebody from behind hard enough, first they became high, then saw red, then became unconscious. I could squeeze anybody on the team unconscious, even Fats Molydeux from Mamou, who weighed 310.

It is possible that I said something aloud. I said: “How strange it is that there are no longer any great historical events.” In fact, that was what I was musing over, that it seemed of no great moment whether I squeezed them or did not squeeze them.

“How strange it is that there are no longer any great historical events,” I said.

At any rate, it is certain that after a while Janos gasped, “You’re not killing me, you’re killing her.”

“That’s true,” I said and let go. He was right. I had been pressing him into Margot’s softness. He was as hard as a turtle and not the least compressed by the squeezing but she had passed out. But no sooner had I let go, and more quickly than I am telling you, than he had leaped up and begun doing things to me, California-kung-fu-karate tricks, knee to my groin, thumb in my eye, heel-of-hand chops to my Adam’s apple, and so forth. I stood musing. There were many clever and scrappy moves against my person which I duly and even approvingly registered.”A bed is no place to fight,” I said and we flew through the air until we crashed into the armoire. Janos must have found the knife in my game pouch where it had cut through me cloth and which I had forgotten, for when we broke apart at the armoire, he had it in his hand and was making wary circling movements, feinting and parrying like a scrappy movie star being put to the blood test by Apaches.

“Ah now,” I said with relief, advancing on him, rejoicing in the turn events were taking. “Ah.” A fight! A fight is a simple event. Getting hurt in a fight is not bad. I was backing him toward the cul-de-sac between the armoire and the corner. When he felt the wall behind him, he made a quick California move, whirled, cut my shoulder with the knife, and kicked me in the throat. I couldn’t breathe but it didn’t matter much because we were breathing methane anyway. After he whirled he must have also thrown the knife, for the flat of the blade hit my chest and the handle came to hand as neatly as if it were a trick we planned. Again I was embracing his back. This time I was more aware of his nakedness and his vulnerability. Here he was in my arms, a mother’s boy, not really athletic despite his kung-fu skill, but somewhat pigeon-breasted and not used to being naked and smelling of underarm and Ban. So he might have appeared, an Italian boy, a Jewish boy, naked and vulnerable at the army induction center in the Bronx. He was not used to being naked. Did it ever occur to you that we spent a lot of time naked, naked in the locker room, naked in the river swimming, naked taking sunbaths on the widow’s walk? Naked, he was more naked than we ever were.

We were on the floor. My thighs clasped his in a scissors grip.

“For Christ’s sake, what are you doing?”

“Nothing much.”

“That’s something I’d like to talk about,” he said panting hard yet speaking quickly and sincerely.

“What?”

“The absurdity of life. I’ve sensed you were into that.”

“Ah.”

“What?”

“Yes,” I said marveling over his actor’s gift of getting onto the way people talk. For I could recognize my voice in his, the flat giddy musing tone. He had observed me after all. Were we both drunk on methane or was it the case that in fact there were no “great moments” in life? Or both?

“Let’s talk. There’s one thing I always wanted to ask you.”

“Yes?”

“It has to do with something I’ve always desperately wanted in my life. I think you want it too.”

“Yes?”

“I want—”

We’ll never know what he wanted because his head was bending back and I was cutting his throat, I think. No, I’m sure. What I remember better than the cutting was the sense I had of casting about for an appropriate feeling to match the deed. Weren’t we raised to believe that “great deeds” were performed with great feelings — anger, joy, revenge, and so on? I remember casting about for the feeling and not finding one. Yet I am sure the deed was committed, because his voice changed. His voice dropped a foot from his mouth to his windpipe and came out in a rush, not a word, against my hand holding the knife. He was still under me and there was no feel of the heat of blood on my hand, only the rush and bubble of air as the knife went through the cartilage. I held him for a while until the warm air stopped blowing the hairs on the back of my hand. Yes, I feel certain that is what happened.

Standing by the bed, I gazed down at Margot. I do not remember the storm. She was not dead, not even unconscious. She was watching me, I think. The kerosene light made her cheekbones look wide, an Indian’s cheekbones. Her eyes were pools of darkness. They were open, I think. How could I be sure? I sat on the bed and with my arm across her put her cheek to my face. She was breathing. When she blinked, her eyelashes stirred the air against my cheek. In the midst of the hurricane I felt this minuscule wind her eyelashes made against my cheek. She said something. I felt her diaphragm move under my arm.

“What?”

“What are we going to do?” She spoke in my ear. “Is he—?”

“Yes.”

“Oh no,” she said in simple dismay as if Suellen had dropped her best Sèvres vase.

Margot, unlike me, had a feeling but not a remarkable one. It was dismay that things had gotten out of hand. Perhaps the house had begun to break up under the force of the wind. We had better do something about it.

“What are we going to do?”

“We?”

“You.”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh oh oh,” she said, taking one hand in the other and actually wringing it. “Is there anything I can do? Oh my God.”

“You could have.”

“Me. Just me?”

“Yes.”

“Why me?”

“Because I loved you.” That was true enough I knew even though I couldn’t remember what it was to love her.

“Loved? Love?” she asked.

“Because you were the only person who knew how to turn it all into love.”

“Love?”

“Sweetness dearness innocence singing laughing. ‘Love.’”

“Laughing?”

“That may have been your secret. You had a way of laughing.”

“Yes, I know. I’ll tell you what.”

“What?”

“Take your weight off me a little. I can’t breathe.”

“Neither can I. I’m not on you. It’s not the weight.”

“Oh, God. What is wrong? I can’t breathe.”

“Don’t worry about that. It’s the storm.”

“I tell you what, Lance.”

“What?”

“Let’s go away.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. We can start a new life. I’m the only one who can make you happy.” It is strange but she spoke offhandedly now, as if nothing mattered a great deal. She too knew that there are no longer any “great historical moments.” She even took hold of the fabric of my hunting jacket and in her old way plucked a loose thread from it.

“That’s true.”

“I know that I know how to and you know that I know how to.”

“Yes.”

It was true.

We must have been poisoned by the methane because the roaring of the storm was inside my head and I could hardly hear her. She was delirious. She was talking again, but not even to me any longer, about being a child in the Texas countryside and walking to town Saturdays and taking her good shoes along in a paper bag. She would change shoes at the bridge and hide the old shoes in a culvert.

“I’m nothing—” she began. “What’s the matter with me?”

“What?”

“That’s what you never knew. With you I had to be either — or — but never a — uh — woman. It was good for a while. Oooh. Everything’s gone black. I’m dying.”

“No. The lamp went out.”

I sat on the bed thinking: How could the lamp go out? To this day I don’t know. Perhaps the wick was too low.

“Wait,” I told her and crawled on all fours to get it. Why did I say that to her? Wait. Because I wanted her to tell me how we could do it, start all over again? But not in a serious way. Yes. I was delirious too. I had forgotten about the methane and was thinking of planning a trip with her.

Before I lit the lamp, I sat on the floor, the lamp between me and the bed. my back against the outer wall.

“Do you really think—” I said, turning up the wick, and struck the match. For a tenth of a second I could see her in the flaring, lying on her side like Anna, knees drawn up, cheek against her hands pressed palms together, dark eyes gazing

Without a sound the room flowered. All was light and air and color and movement but not a sound. I was moved. That is to say, for the first time in thirty years I was moved off the dead center of my life. Ah then, I was thinking as I moved, there are still great moments. I was wheeling slowly up into the night like Lucifer blown out of hell, great wings spread against the starlight.

I knew everything. I even knew what had happened. Belle Isle had blown up. Why, I wondered, wheeling, hadn’t Raine’s room blown first? Was it because the duct was much smaller there or because I had left the chimney on the lamp?

I must have been blown through the wall, with the wall, because I came down on the outer sloping thicket of the great oak where the limb swept to the ground, touched, and came up again. When I came to myself, the fire was hot against my cheek. But there was no great inferno. The roof and upper floors were gone and what flame there was was blown flat and in places separate from the building like the flame of a Bunsen burner. The south wind of the hurricane blew the heat away from me. I felt myself. Nothing was broken. I looked at myself. My hand and shoulder were bloody. I did not feel bad. I stood up, for some reason put my hands in my pockets, and walked up the front steps as I had done ten thousand times before. The heat, carried away by the wind, was not great. Perhaps I had been unconscious a long time. Most of the walls of the ground floor were down. There was no second floor.

What did you say? How did I get burned?

I had to go back to find the knife.