Lancelot (10 page)

This girl in the next cell is not a virgin. She was raped by three men in one night and then forced to perform fellatio on them.

I've learned more about her. In fact, I managed to catch a glimpse of her chart while the nurses were off in the lounge drinking coffee. She is twenty-nine and comes, like Lucy, from Georgia. She dropped out of Agnes Scott, a fine young-ladies' school, and went to live in an artists' community in La Jolla. The standard boring story of our times. Then, thinking better of it, of California and the New Life (which of course is not a new life at all but the last spasm of the old, the logical and inevitable culmination, the very caricature of the old, the new life being nothing more or less than what their parents would do if they dared), she removed to the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, lived in Desire project, offered herself up in service to mankind. Whereupon mankind took her up on her offer, raped her for her pains, and left her for dead in the Quarter.

Then how is she like Lucy? How is she the Lucy of the new world? Is it because the violation she suffered has in some sense restored her virginity, much as a person recovering from the plague is immune to the plague? I don't quite know why she is so much like Lucy except that I want the same thing of her I wanted from Lucy: to come close but keep a little distance between us, to ask the simplest questions in a new language—
How are you
—just to hear the sound of her voice, to touch the tips of her fingers, to hand her through an open door ahead of me, my hand pressed lightly against the small of her back. The night of the day I discovered Margot's infidelity, I left my old life path, became sober for the first time in years, bathed, shaved, dressed in clean clothes, and spent the night wide awake and watchful in my plantation rocker placed at such an angle that, looking through a window and the one clear pane of glass in the stained-glass door Margot had sure enough found for me (the final camp touch which Margot said would make the pigeonnier a charming little place and it did), I could see Belle Isle and most of the private drive.

My supper companions had left for the Holiday Inn about eleven o'clock to view the week's rushes. That took no more than an hour, but afterwards they often got carried away by discussion, “more like knock-down-drag-out-argument,” said Margot, which went on till one or two in the morning.

How long would the knock-down-drag-out argument last that night, I wondered and, instead of drinking myself to sleep, stayed up to see.

She did not come home at all.

Or rather her Country Squire wagon, she alone in it, turned into the driveway at 8:30 the next morning, rolling so slowly that it hardly made a crunch in the pea gravel. As punctually as Kant setting out for the university at exactly six o'clock so that shopkeepers along the way could set their watches by him, it had been my custom to arise at exactly nine o'clock, stagger to a cold shower, and, of late, take a drink. At exactly 9:37 (two minutes after the news) I would take my seat at the breakfast table at Belle Isle. At 10:15 I was at my office, helping Negroes in the sixties, handling old ladies' estates in the seventies.

That morning I sat in my plantation rocker, sober and clear-headed, and rocked for a while.

I sat down to breakfast at the usual time, Margot ate heartily, elbows on table, wiry head bent over steaming scrambled eggs. My hand shook slightly as I drank coffee; my stomach shrank as if braced against the first hot bourbon of the day.

“How were the rushes?”

“Oh. Christ. One abortion after another. The bloody color was off again. Bob was beside himself.”

Now
bloody
was the word. Merlin was not really English but lived there long enough so that everything was bloody this and bloody that.

In my new sobriety things were better and worse. My senses were acute, too acute. I became aware of the warp and woof of the tablecloth. My eyes followed one linen thread under and over, under and over. I noticed flecks of white porcelain showing through the worn gold leaf on the rim of the coffee cup where the lips touched it ninety degrees away from the handle. When Elgin touched me to see if I wanted more coffee, I nearly jumped out of my chair.

I watched Margot. She ate like a horse and looked fine, not fat but firm and full-armed. Ten years had turned her from callow coltish skittish-mustang Texas girl to assured chatelaine and mistress of Belle Isle, more Louisianian than Louisianians for they didn't know what they were like and she did. Her face was if anything more soft-eyed and voluptuous, as only a thirty-two-year-old woman can be voluptuous. There was now a fine freckling over her bare shoulders from her golfing, like a lady golf pro. In the thin clear translucent skin beside the nose bridge, the freckles had merged into a darkening and dampening which in any other woman might have looked like circles under eyes but in her was simply plum-shadow and ripeness. When she sat down she settled herself, broadening her bottom to fit exactly the shallow B-shaped scoop of her chair.

Outwardly nothing was changed. Yet when I folded the newspaper and pushed back my chair to leave, she wiped the last crumb of bacon from her lip and said almost to herself: “I was tired afterwards—in fact I got sick as a dog so I stayed on at the Inn, barged in on Raine and just said, Sister, move over.”

Nothing was changed except that when she said that, I was pushing away from the table and I stopped a second both arms outstretched to the table's edge. More than a second, for my eyes were on the second hand of my watch. A fly crawled along the gold band (gift from Margot). I waited for him to step off onto my wrist. He did. I watched him touch a hair. He did, crawling under it, everting and scrubbing his wings. As he did so, he moved the hair. The hair moved its root which moved a nerve which sent a message to my brain. I felt a tickle.

I went to my office as usual, came home for lunch as usual, returned to the pigeonnier as usual, but instead of having three drinks and taking a nap, I sent for Elgin.

Tell me something. Why did I have to know the truth about Margot and know it with absolute certainty? Or rather why, knowing the truth, did I have to know more, prove more,
see?
Does one need to know more, ever more and more, in order that one put off acting on it or maybe even not act at all?

But why? Why did it become the most important, the sole obsession of my very life, to determine whether or not Margot slept with Merlin when in fact I knew she had, or at least with somebody not me? You tell me, you being the doctor-scientist and soul expert as well, merchant of guilt and getting rid of it and of sorting out sins yet knowing as well as I that it, her fornication, anybody's fornication, amounts to no more than molecules encountering molecules and little bursts of electrons along tiny nerves—no different in kind from that housefly scrubbing his wings under my hair.

Well, for once you look very solemn and unironic. Did I love her? you ask.

Love. Hm. The older I get, the less I know about such large subjects. I can say this. There was a time just before and after we were married when I could not not touch her. There was no getting enough of her. The very behavior I used to abhor in others I carried on with her and never a second thought or care in this world; touch her in public. Neck! Go to the A & P with her, heft the cold red beef flesh in one hand and hold her warm hand with the other and in the parking lot at four o'clock in the afternoon
neck!
Spoon! We'd drive down the road like white trash in a pickup truck, heads noodled together, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. thigh to thigh, my right hand thrust fondly between her legs.

Even later when we drank too much together, it was good, the drinking, drunkenness, and the coming together every whichway, on the floor, across the table, under the table, standing up in a coat closet at a party. There was no other thought than to possess her, as much of her with as much of me and any way at all, all ways and it seemed for always. Drinking, laughing, and loving, it is a good life. Not even marriage spoils it. For a while.

Did I love her then, that day I speak of? Love. No, not love. Not hatred, not even jealousy. What do those old words mean? Emotions? Were there ever any such things as emotions? If so, people have fewer emotions these days. Merlin's actors could register fifteen standard emotions and not share a single real feeling between them.

No, my only “emotion” was a sense of suddenly coming alive, that peculiar wakefulness when a telephone rings in the middle of the night. That and an all-consuming curiosity. I had to know. If Merlin “knew” my wife, I had to know his knowing her.

Why? I don't know. I ask you. That's what I want with you. Not knowing why, I don't really know why I did what I did. I only knew for the first time in years exactly what to do. I sent for Elgin.

Elgin was surprised to be summoned and more surprised
to
see me. No bottle, no drinks, no naps, no TV, no pacing the floor hands in pockets, but standing quiet and watchful.

“Sit down, Elgin.”

“Yes. sir.”

We sat down in two slave chairs. Elgin. I remember, was doing tourist spiels that summer and still wore his guide jacket with the Belle Isle coat of arms on the breast pocket, a livery which no house servant had ever worn but which by my grandfather's calculation should satisfy the tourist's need for proper NBC guide and authentic Southern butler rolled into one.

Elgin's expression did not change. The only sign of his surprise was that though his face was turned slightly away, head cocked as if he were deaf, his eyes never left mine and had a wary hooded look.

“Elgin. I'm going to ask a favor of you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It is not difficult. The point is, I want you to do it without further explanation on my part. Would you?”

“Yes, sir,” said Elgin without a change of tone or blink of eye. “Even if it's criminal or immoral”—slight smile now. “You know I'd do anything you axed.”

Elgin was a senior at M.I.T. and had what he thought were two reasons to be grateful to me, though I knew better than to rely on gratitude, a dubious state of mind if indeed there is such a thing. And in truth I had done very little for him, the kind of easy favors native liberals do and which are almost irresistible to the doer, if not to the done to, yielding as they do a return of benefit to one and a good feeling to the other all out of proportion to the effort expended. That was one of the pleasures of the sixties: it was so easy to do a little which seemed a lot. We basked in our own sense of virtue and in what we took to be
their
gratitude. Maybe that was why it didn't last very long. Who can stand gratitude?

I helped him get a scholarship, which took very little doing what with the Ivy League beating the bushes for any black who could read without using his finger and what with Elgin graduating first in his class at St. Augustine and winning the state science fair with a project demonstrating electron spin which I never quite understood.

So Elgin was smart, Elgin was well educated. Elgin could read and write better than most whites. And yet. Yet Elgin still talks muffle-mouthed, says
ax
for
ask, sa-urdy
for
Saturday, chirren
for
children.

He was a slim but well-set-up youth with mauve brown skin, a narrow intense face, a non-Afro close clip as high off his ears and up his neck as a Young Republican's, and a lately acquired frowning finicky manner which irritated me a little just as it irritates me in a certain kind of scientist who does not know what he does not know and discredits more than he should. Elgin was one of them. It was as if he had sailed in a single jump from Louisiana pickaninny playing marbles under a chinaberry tree to a smart-ass M.I.T. senior, leapfrogging not only the entire South but all of history as well. And maybe he knew what he was doing. From cotton patch to quantum physics and glad not to have stopped along the way.

But he and his family had yet another reason to be grateful to me, a slightly bogus reason to be sure, which I in my own slightly bogus-liberal fashion was content not to have set straight. He thought I saved his family from the Klan. In a way I did. His father, Ellis, and mother, Suellen, our faithful and until recently ill-paid retainers, and his little brother. Fluker, had all been threatened by the local Kluxers because Ellis's church (he was its part-time preacher) had served as a meeting place for CORE or Snick or one of those. They burned a cross, threatened to burn the church and come “get” the Buells. It is true I went to see the Grand Kleagle and the harassment stopped. The story which I never had quite the energy or desire to correct was that in the grand mythic Lamar tradition I had confronted the Kleagle in his den, “called him out” with some such Southern Western shoot-out ultimatum as “Now listen here, you son of a bitch. I don't know which one of you is bothering Ellis but I'm holding you responsible and if one hair of a Buell head is harmed, I'm going to shoot your ass off for you,” and so forth and so forth. I put a stop to it all right, but in a manner more suited to Southern complexities and realities than the simple dreams of the sixties, when there were only good people and bad people. I went to see the Grand Kleagle all right, who was none other than J. B. Jenkins, a big dumb boy who played offensive tackle with me in both high school and college. He was as big and dumb and as good a tackle as can be, managing even to flunk out of a state school later, no small achievement in those days, and had ever since operated not a Gulf Oil service station but a Gulf Coast Oil service station. He was a good family man, believed in Jesus Christ, America, the Southern way of life, hated Communists and liberals, and was not altogether wrong on any count. At any rate, all I said to him in the sweltering galvanized tin shack of his Gulf Coast Oil station was: “Now, J.B., I want you to do me a favor.” “What's that, Lance, old buddy?” “You know what I want. I want you to lay off Ellis and his church.” “Now, goddamn, Lance, you know as well as I do ain't nothing but a bunch of Jew Communists out there stirring up the niggers.” “Will you take my word for something, J.B.?” “You know I will.” “I swear to you there's no Jews or Communists out there and I will swear to you that Ellis is a good Godfearing Baptist like you and you have nothing to fear from him.” “Yeah, but he is one more uppity nigger.” “Yeah, but he's
my
nigger, J.B. He's been working for us for forty years and you know that.” “Well, that's true. Well, all right. Lance. Don't worry about nothing. Lets us have a drink.” So we had a drink of straight three-dollar whiskey in that 110-degree iron shack. Sweat sprang off our heads like halos. And that was that.