Lancelot (11 page)

Ah well. Like I told you, real life is more complicated and ambiguous than in the movies. Ellis Buell was grateful. Ellis Buell had seen too much TV and
Gunsmoke.
“You should have seen Mr. Lance call that white trash out.” And so forth.

His son Elgin was a different matter. Actually Elgin was the only one who didn't care much one way or the other about such matters. Like Archimedes he was more interested, exclusively interested, in writing out his formulae and would not have cared or even noticed whether it was a Kluxer or a Roman soldier who lifted his hand against him.

Elgin. I do believe, would do what I asked, not out of gratitude (a very bad emotion as both he and I knew), but because he liked me and felt sorry for me. Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life.

I had counted too on my request intriguing him as a kind of mathematical game, which it was. It did.

Did it ever occur to you that after we went to college we never
touched
each other? Do you remember walking down Bourbon Street behind two Russian sailors who were holding hands? Do you remember sleeping in a motel bed in Jackson, Mississippi, with a whore between us? Why was it all right for us to simultaneously assault the poor whore between us but never once touch each other? Who is crazy, we or the Russians?

Ah, you touch my shoulder. Do you know that I am embarrassed?

Oh, Christ, there is something wrong with my mind. I've drawn a blank again. It's a little frightening. I could use a drink. Everybody talks about the horrors of drink, which are real enough, but not about its beauties. Your God gave us wine, didn't he, and threw good parties? Half-drunk, I can remember everything, see everything as it is and was, the beauty in it rather than the sadness. I could remember everything we ever did. There was a lovely looseness then and a letting go and a magical transformation of those sad Southern afternoons into a garden of delights. Wasn't there? We had a good time, you and I. Then youth ended and you left for God. I joined the A.C.L.U. and became a liberal. Then a drunk. Sober, I could not bear to look at Belle Isle and the great oaks; they seemed so sad and used up and self-canceling. Five good drinks and they seemed themselves.

It's not that I can't remember. It's all there, what happened, spread out like a map, but I have trouble collecting my thoughts, focusing. Perhaps I remember too well like memorizing a speech, reciting it a dozen times before the mirror, then when the time comes to speak, you can't come up with the first word.

Once my father told me he had a recurring waking nightmare. What if one should simply fail in what one set out to do in life, fail utterly, cannot remember the first word, have the first thought, carry out the simplest action, complete the simplest task? Like an actor forgetting his lines and bringing the whole play to an awful embarrassing halt. What if one should rise to address the jury and forget? (My father had a Harvard law degree but never practiced.) Secretly I believe he was afraid that of all the people on earth he alone would fail and the world would come to an end out of shame for him.

With such a fear, what happens to a man? Nothing. He didn't, couldn't, try anything for fear the world would come to an end if he failed. So he became editor of the second best of the two weekly newspapers in a country parish, suffered from “weak lungs” whatever that is, not tuberculosis but a “tendency” toward it, and was a semi-invalid, spending his days writing poems and little historical vignettes. The high point of his life came when he was elected Poet Laureate of Feliciana Parish by the Kiwanis Club.

Let me tell you the family secret which not even you know, though you know everything else. But do you know that I honestly believe that his wife, my mother, Lily, cuckolded him too? I remember Uncle Harry, also called Buster, a distant cousin of hers, a handsome beefy Schenley salesman, ex-Realsilk salesman, who was always in and out of Belle Isle when I was a child. No one was gladder to see him than I because he brought the most expensive toys, Erector sets, scout knives with twenty blades, and would throw me ten feet in the air—happiness! squeals! Children are more easily bribed than cocker spaniels. And there was my father reclining on a lounge chair under an afghan on the upper gallery looking down the oak alley and writing poems which were not as good as Longfellow's
Evangeline,
which is bad enough, but like it, and gentle historical vignettes whenever he located another old “non-Roman” church. Uncle Harry would come roaring up in his Buick convertible and holler out: I'm taking everybody joyriding to False River. My father would insist that Mother go: she needed the air: Suellen can look after me, can't you, Suellen? “Sho now, you go on ahead. Miss Lily, you ain't been anywhere all summer.” And off they'd go, we'd go—I sometimes but not always—“joyriding.” Christ, joyriding! Jesus, do you really imagine that—? Of course the question is not why but why not. Ha ha, what a laugh in a way. Because we were such an honorable family. And of course here is the most intriguing question of all: Did my father know all along?

You look so unhappy. Who are you unhappy for? Me? Lily? My father? Sinful suffering humanity? Your own sunk melancholy family? Are you playing the priest now?

Elgin? Yes, you're right. It was Elgin I was talking about. Yes. No. Wait. I did mention a map. It wasn't a map. It was a floor plan. I remember. I gave Elgin the floor plan of the Holiday Inn which I had gotten that very afternoon from my Uncle Lock. Bushrod Laughlin Lamar, who operated it.

“Elgin, here is a floor plan of the Holiday Inn.”

“Yes, sir.” He took it. It could have been his pay check for all the reaction he showed. Does anything white people do ever surprise blacks?

“Here's a problem where you might be able to help me. You don't need to know the details. It is enough to say that I am concerned about my daughter Lucy, who is young and impressionable and may have gotten into some difficulties with drugs. But first I have to have the facts, beginning with where she goes, how she spends her time.”

Elgin squinted hard at the floor plan as if he expected to see Lucy.

“What I want you to do is this. I want you to register at the Holiday Inn for the next three nights and keep a log of her comings and goings. You know, the film crew is there, and she's stagestruck and hangs around at all hours. In fact, make a complete record. Make a note of anyone you know: Merlin, Troy Dana, Janos Jacoby, Raine Robinette, even me and my wife. I want the whole picture. Do you understand?”

His single swift opaque look told me he did understand. Understood and agreed. Understood even that there was something I needed to know but didn't want to tell him, nor did he want me to.

“Now here's the problem. Think of it as a mathematical game. I want you to pick one of those rooms. I've fixed it up with Lock, you can have any room you want, he knows you're in the film.”

Placing the floor plan on the plantation desk between us, I wrote names in empty rooms.

“The idea is to pick a room or any other vantage point which commands a view of the following: the inner door of the Oleander Room here—that's where they view the rushes—Dana's room here, Raine's here, Merlin's here, Jacoby's here. Here's the hitch (this should interest you—it baffles me): there would be no problem if the inner court were a simple quadrangle. You could simply sit at the window of nearly every room and see everything, even Merlin's room, which is on the second story. All you would have to do is choose a room, say here on the first floor opposite. But as you see, it is not so simple. The court is L-shaped. So if you took this room, you could not see Raine's room here. And if you took this room, you could see Raine's room but not Merlin's.”

“Mm.” Now Elgin was interested, transported from the inelegant mysteries of white folks' doings to the elegant simplicities of geometry. Using his thumb, he began to push his lip over his eyetooth, a new mannerism. My guess is he got it from one of his M.I.T. professors.

“Take these binoculars, Elgin. They are excellent night glasses. Don't forget your log. In your log make a note of everything you see: not only the exact time anyone enters or leaves a room, but anything else you happen to notice, what a person may carry with him, what they do, the smallest item of behavior.”

Elgin was busy drawing lines across the court, angles and declinations. He frowned happily. I repeated my instructions.

“You mean all night?”

“Yes. That is, from eleven to dawn. Or rather, just before dawn. I don't want you to be seen.”

“For three nights?”

“Maybe. At the outside. We'll see how it goes. You're relieved as of now from guide duty. Go home and get some sleep. I'll tell Ellis that I'm sending you to New Orleans to take a deposition.”

“I wonder what this room is. Probably the alcove for Coke machine and ice maker.”

“Probably. No window.”

Elgin took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “You see, here's what it comes to.” I could see him twenty years later, for his expression, his mannerisms had already begun to set; see him behind his desk, give himself to a problem, quickly take off his glasses and rub his eyes. “The problem as you pose it is insoluble—unless you want to rig up a system of mirrors, bore holes in floors, which I gather you don't.”

“I don't.”

“You see, if I were in 214, an upper room near the inner corner of the ell, I could see every room but Raine's on the first floor. On the other hand, if I were across the court near the outer corner of the ell, I couldn't see Merlin's room.” More lines, lines crossing lines like electrons colliding.

“To see all rooms, posing the problem as you do, you'd need two observers. Me here and, say, Fluker here.”

“Fluker! He'd go to sleep!”

We both laughed. The very name was funny for us, a secret joke.

Elgin smiled his old smile, his sweet white-flashing un-mannered smile. “He sho would. Hm. Let's see. Let's-us-see.” He gazed at the plan and tapped his pencil. Why did I feel like the student visiting the professor? “We-ull!” (How happy scientists are! Why didn't we become scientists, Percival? They confront problems which can be solved. We don't know what we confront. Does it have a name?)

Elgin put on his glasses. “The pool is here?”

“Right.”

“Is it lit?”

“By underwater lights after ten. The floodlights are fixed to the balconies but the area around the pool is fairly dark.”

“Lounges and chairs around here?”

“Yes.”

“Scrubs—that is, shrubbery around here?”

“Yes.” Ellis, his father, used to say
scrubs
for
shrubs
: “You want me to cut them scrubs?” Not even Ellis says that any more.

“Then there's only one place.” Elgin dropped his pencil with a clatter, picked it up. made a big X, dropped it again, sat back. He smiled. His eyelids lowered. He'd made a breakthrough!

“The middle of the court?”

“Sure. Where else?”

“But—”

“What kind of lounge chairs they got?”

“What kind?”

“I mean light aluminum or those heavy wooden ones?”

“Redwood, heavy, black webbing. Too heavy to steal, I remember. Lock is proud of them.”

Again Elgin smiled his old brilliant sweet smile. In his triumph he permitted himself to be what he was: a twenty-two-year-old Southern youth who smiled and laughed a great deal. “It's dark here you say. The lounges are dark, the webbing is black. I'll wear black swim trunks and man can't nobody see nothing.”

I smiled. He wasn't even burlesquing himself as black or Southern black but as TV-Hollywood-Sammy-Davis-Junior black and he knew that I knew it.

He snapped his fingers. “No. It's even better than that.”

“How?”

“Don't you see? It wouldn't matter if anyone saw me at that distance. A man in trunks by the pool. Nobody would pay the slightest attention. Like Poe's
Purloined Letter
.”

Poe's
Purloined Letter.
I thought about J. B. Jenkins, bad man, good man, bad good man, Kluxer, Christian, tackle, and comrade at arms against Alabama's mighty Crimson Tide. The only Poe he knew was Alcide “Coonass” Poe, tailback from De Ridder. J. B. and I, sunk in life, soaked in old Louisiana blood and tears and three hundred years of Christian sin and broadsword Bowie-knife Sharps-rifle bloodshed and victory-defeat. And Elgin leapfrogging us all, transformed overnight into snotty-cool Yankee professor.

Poe's
Purloined Letter
indeed. Poe. He too had got onto Elgin's secret: Find happiness in problems and puzzles and mathematical gold bugs. But he let go of it. Went nutty like me. Elgin wouldn't.

“How are you going to get the binoculars out there?”

“Wrapped in my towel.”

“Okay. Then the location of the room doesn't matter. Go on out there now and register. Keep your log tonight. When you get back, get some sleep and meet me here about this time tomorrow. I'll put Fluker on guide duty.”

“Fluker.” Again we laughed. “No telling what Fluker gon say.”

“He'll do fine. Anyhow, what difference does it make?”

“Yeah.” Elgin was casting ahead again. “How to see to write in the dark is the thing. White pencil on black? Pencil light? No, what I'm going to use”—clearly he was talking to himself—“is a Kiefer blacklight stylus.”

“You do that.”

5

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