Lancelot (14 page)

So she finished the house and we found ourselves at a loss. What to do? We did what other well-off thirty-five-year-old couples did: went skiing in Aspen, house-partying, fishing and drinking on the Gulf Coast, house-partying and drinking in Highlands.

But what to do then? What to do with time? Make love. Have a child. We did that. At least I thought we did that. But after she finished Belle Isle and named her child Siobhan, there was nothing to do. Siobhan was well looked after, especially when granddaddy Tex moved in with us.

I could see her problem. Christ, what was she going to
do?
What to do with that Texas energy and her passion for making things either over or of a piece. What did God do after he finished creation? Christ, she didn't know how to rest. At least in Louisiana we knew how to take things easy. We could always drink.

That was when she revived her interest in the “performing arts” and went to Dallas-Arlington to study under Merlin.

Did I love her? Why are you always asking about love? Have you been crossed up too? Isn't your God's love enough for you? Margot's love was enough for me. I loved her sexually in such a way that I could not not touch her. My happiness was being with her. My old saturninity vanished. I hugged and kissed her in the street, necked in the car like white trash in the daytime, felt her up under the table in restaurants, and laughed like a boy to see her blush and knock my hand away and, looking anxiously around, revert to her old Texasese: “Git away from here! What you think you doing, boy!”

There is no joy on this earth like falling in love with a woman and managing at the same time the trick of keeping just enough perspective to see her fall in love too, to see her begin to see you in a different way, to see her color change, eyes soften, her hand of itself reach for you. Your saints say, Yes but the love of God is even better, but Jesus how could this be so? Well? Your eyes go distant as if you were thinking of a time long ago. Does that mean that you are no longer a believer or that nowadays not even believers can understand such things? Doesn't your own Jewish Bible say there is nothing under the sun like the way of a man with a maid?

And there is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.

Do you know what jealousy is? Jealousy is an alteration in the very shape of time itself. Time loses its structure. Time stretches out. She isn't here. Where is she? Who is she with? There is so much time. The minutes and hours creep by. What is she doing? She could be doing anything. She was not here. Her not being here was like oxygen not being here. What am I going to do with the rest of the day? Something tightened in my chest.

Elgin came in with a clipboard and sat across my desk looking both wary and pleased. When he put on his black horn-rimmed glasses, his hand trembled slightly. He looked like a smart student facing an important examination. I noticed he was dressed unusually, in what I took to be his school clothes, neat belted-in-the-back jeans, white shirt, narrow black tie. Had it been a problem for him to decide how he would appear? as house servant? tour guide? private eye? smart student?

I had been sitting in my pigeonnier watching boys build a bonfire on the levee. They started before Thanksgiving, cutting willows in the batture to make twenty-foot-high tepees which burn all night Christmas eve, making a great flaming crescent the whole length of English Turn like the campfires of a sleeping army.

It was not Margot I was thinking about but time, what to do with time. Sober, free of smoke and nicotine for the first time in years, my body cells tingled, watchful and uneasy. What next? What's coming up? My tongue was ready to taste, my muscles were ready to contract, my liver hummed away, my genitals prickled. Then I realized why I drank and smoked. It was a way of dealing with time. What to do with time? A fearful thing: a human body of ten billion cells ready to do any one of ten billion things. But what to do?

The empty tape was spinning past the tape head.

“Ahem.” Elgin cleared his throat. I gave a start. “What do you—”

“Oh. Is that the log you kept last night?”

“Yes, sir.” Then he
had
felt the need to take on some guise or other. But which? house servant? private eye?

“Why don't you just read it, Elgin?”

That helped. Now he could prop clipboard against crossed knee, push his glasses up his nose with his thumb.

“One-forty a.m. Subjects left Oleander Room.” He looked up. “They stood by the vending machines talking for ten minutes.”

“They? Who were they?”

“Miss Lucy.”
Miss Lucy?
He had never called her that. I saw that he felt a need to put a distance between himself and this business (though he was also proud of what he had done). In his nervousness he had put the greatest distance he could think of: he had retreated to being an old-time servant.

“Go ahead.”

“One-fifty. Miss Lucy and Miss Margot to room 115, Miss Raine's room.”

“Never mind the Misters and Misses.”

“Okay. Troy Dana to room 118, his room. Merlin to 226, Jacoby to 145.

“Two-twelve a.m. Miss Margot leave 115 and go to 226.” For Margot he still needed the
Miss.

“Merlin's room?”

“Yes, sir. Two-twenty-five. Troy Dana leave 118 and go to 115.”

“Raine's room. That puts Troy, Lucy, and Raine in 115.”

“Yes, sir. Two-fifty-one a.m. Miss Margot leave” (leave not leaves: he was nervous) “226 and go to 145.”

“Jacoby's room?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go on.”

“Five-oh-four a.m. Lucy leave 115 in a hurry, running like, go out. To her car.”

“Yes?”

“Five-fourteen. Troy Dana also leaves 115, goes to 118, his room.” Leaves. He was calmer.

“Okay.”

“Five-twenty-four. Miss Margot leaves 145, goes out. To her car. Oh, I forgot. Three-five. Jacoby went out for a glass of water.” He looked up. “I think Miss Margot was sick.”

“Yes?”

“That's all.”

“That's it?”

“Yes, sir. You told me to leave at daylight.” Feeling better, he shoved up the bridge of his glasses with his thumb. I could imagine his students years later, taking him off, doing a school skit imitating his doing this.

Ha. Maybe she
was
sick!

I remember thinking how odd Elgin was, switching back and forth from house nigger to young professor.

“Okay. That does it. Very good. Thanks, Elgin.”

Relieved, he swiftly got to his feet.

“No, wait.” I had already known what I was going to do. And how I was going to deal with it, time coming at me and ten billion cells tingling, waiting.

He sat down slowly. I picked up the telephone and called my cousin Laughlin at the Holiday Inn. Elgin, simply curious now, watched me.

“Lock, I need a favor.” I could ask. I had loaned him the money, Margot's money, to build the motel.

“Sho, Lance. Just you ask.”

He was too quick and ingratiating. Gratitude, as well it might, made him uneasy. I could see him sitting at his desk: his clean short-sleeved shirt, neat receding hair turning brown-gray, Masonic ring on finger, hand on socks with clocks, short body just slightly fat, a simple shape like a balloon blown up just enough to smooth the wrinkles. He looked like the president of the Optimists Club, which in fact he was. A doomed optimist. The only difference between Laughlin and me was that Laughlin had not even had his youthful moment of glory. Instead he had had twenty or thirty jobs in the past twenty or thirty years, at each of which he had not exactly failed (for he was earnest and if he was stupid it was in some mysterious self-defeating way which not even he was aware of) but rather completed what he set out to do. He lost interest, the job ran out, the company went out of business, people stopped buying bicycles, sugar tripled in price and ruined his Nabisco distributorship. Now he answered too quickly. Two things made him nervous: one, that he owed me a favor; the other, that he was succeeding. Success terrified him.

“Just you ask, Lance,” he said, gaining confidence from my hesitation.

“I want you to close the motel for a few days.”

“What's that again?” he asked quickly.

“Just say they're going to cut your gas off temporarily as in fact they might. As you know, most of our gas has got to go to New England.”

“I know but—close the motel? Why?”

“I'll pay you full occupancy even though you're only half full. It should be for two or three days.”

“But tomorrow's Tuesday.”

“What's that got to do with it?”

“Rotary.”

“I mean the rooms. Go ahead and have Rotary.”

“Why do you want to close the rooms?”

I fell silent. Four boys on the levee were tilting up a tall shorn willow like the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Elgin was watching me, the old Elgin now, big-eyed and unmindful of himself.

“I want all those film people out. They're almost finished. If they leave there, they'll have to get out.”

“Oh.” Oh, I see, he meant. I was counting on his misapprehension and let it stand. “I don't blame you.”

“For what?”

He trod carefully. “For wanting to keep an eye on 'em. I've seen a lot of things in this business.” He'd managed a motel in the French Quarter for a year. “You talk about humbug! But—”

“But what?”

“As long as they don't tear up the furniture or burn the beds or stink up the place with pot, I don't care who does what to who. You wouldn't believe some of the things—college kids are the worst.”

He was either stupid or tactful and I do believe it was the latter. We talked easily, deplored college kids and the vicissitudes of the motel business.

“Okay, Lock?”

“Let's see. It's three-thirty. Too late to close today. But I'll put a notice in each box to be out by check-out time tomorrow.” He warmed up to it. “As a matter of fact, they've been talking about cutting off my gas. How do you like that! New York City is going to get our gas! And that means no heat or air conditioning in the rooms. Don't worry about a thing.” For once, his mournful gratitude gave way to good cheer. It was as if he had repaid his loan. “I don't even care. I'm changing to propane. Do you know what my gas bill was last month?”

“Thank you, Lock.”

Elgin watched me as I hung up. Something had given him leave to relax and be himself.

“Elgin, there are some other things you and only you can do for me.”

“I'll do them.”

In my new freedom I remember thinking: If one knows what he wants to do, others will not only not stand in the way but will lend a hand from simple curiosity and amazement.

“Okay. You recall the other day we were speaking about the chimney hole and the dumbwaiter?”

“Yes.” All ears now.

“All right. Look.” Taking his log from the clipboard, I turned it over and began to draw a floor plan. “I'm making two assumptions. One is that they'll move back into Belle Isle when they leave the motel tomorrow. There's nowhere else to go.”

“Right.”

“Then I'm assuming they'll move back into the same rooms at Belle Isle they had before.”

“Yes. They left their clothes there.”

“Merlin here on one side of the chimney, Jacoby here on the other. But Margot's and Lucy's, Dana's and Raine's rooms are across the hall. That presents a technical problem.”

“Technical problem?”

“Tell me something, Elgin. How would you like to make a movie?”

“Movie? What kind of movie?”

“A new kind of cinéma vérité.” I picked up the pencil. “Here's where you can help me. There are a few technical problems.”

Christ, here's my discovery. You have got hold of the wrong absolutes and infinities. God as absolute? God as infinity? I don't even understand the words. I'll tell you what's absolute and infinite. Loving a woman. But how would you know? You see, your church knows what it's doing: rule out one absolute so you have to look for another.

Do you know what it's like to be a self-centered not unhappy man who leads a tolerable finite life, works, eats, drinks, hunts, sleeps, then one fine day discovers that the great starry heavens have opened to him and that his heart is bursting with it. It? She. Her. Woman. Not a category, not a sex, not one of two sexes, a human female creature, but an infinity.
. What else is infinity but a woman become meat and drink to you, life and your heart's own music, the air you breathe? Just to be near her is to live and have your soul's own self. Just to open your mouth on the skin of her back. What joy just to wake up with her beside you in the morning. I didn't know there was such happiness.

But there is the dark converse: not having her is not breathing. I'm not kidding: I couldn't get my breath without her.

What else is man made for but this? I can see you agree about love but you look somewhat ironic. Are we talking about two different things? In any case, there's a catch. Love is infinite happiness. Losing it is infinite unhappiness.