Lancelot (15 page)

So far so good, you say, somewhat ironically, I notice. A man falls in love with a lovely lusty woman, so what else is new? But can you imagine what it's like to love a lovely lustful woman who lusts but not for you?

Quite a discovery.

The truth is, it never crossed my mind in my entire sweet Southern life that there was such a thing as a lustful woman. Another infinite imponderable. Infinitely appalling. What hath God wrought?

On the other hand, why should not a woman, who is after all a creature like any other, be lustful? Yet to me, the sight of a lustful woman was as incredible as a fire-breathing dragon turning up at the Rotary Club.

What I really mean of course was that what horrified me was the discovery of the possibility that she might lust for someone not me.

But of course I had to make sure of it. Love and lust should not be a matter of speculation.

Margot, it turned out, was indeed sick the morning after Elgin's stakeout. Pale and feverish.

Then perhaps she had simply got sick and been cared for by Merlin and Jacoby. Why is it so hard to make certain of a simple thing?

Margot was sick! Hurray.

Yes, but I was not Siobhan's father and Merlin could be and Merlin was here.

My God, why was I torturing myself?

“When did it come on, Margot?” I asked her, going to her room after breakfast.

“God, I damned near fainted during the rushes. I think I did faint later. Out cold. I just barely managed to drag myself home.”

Can one ever be sure of anything? Did my mother go for innocent joyrides with Uncle Harry, take the air, and see the sights as they said, or did they take the lap robe and head for the woods or a tourist cabin, one of those little pre-motel miniature houses set up on four cinderblocks with a bed, linoleum, gas heater, and tin shower, the essentials.

What does that sorrowful look of yours mean? And what if they did, would it be so bad, is that what you mean? What are you mourning? Them? Me? Us?

You know the main difference between you and me? With you everything seems to get dissolved in a kind of sorrowful solution. Poor weak mankind! The trouble is that in your old tolerant Catholic world-weariness, you lose all distinctions. Love everything. Yes, but at midnight all cats are black, so what difference does anything make? It does make a difference? What? You opened your mouth and then thought better of it—

But don't you see. I had to find out. There I was in early middle age and I couldn't answer the most fundamental question of all. What question? This: Are people as nice as they make out and in fact appear to be, or is it all buggery once the door is closed?

So I meant to find out once and for all. There is something worse than knowing the worst. It is not knowing.

In the back of my mind all along was the sensation I had when I opened my father's sock drawer and found the ten thousand dollars under the argyles my mother, nice lady that she was, had knitted for him, honorable man that he was.

One has to know. There are worse things than bad news.

6

IT WAS LUNCHTIME
when my daughter Lucy came down for breakfast in quilted housecoat, face voluptuous, sleepy-eyed, slightly puffy.

“Aren't you supposed to be in school?” I asked her, remembering it was Tuesday.

“I'm not going back to school.” Her pale heavy face slanted sullenly over her food, eyes blinking regularly. Was she crying?

“Why not?”

“I've got a job.”

“Where?”

“With Raine.”

“Doing what?”

“I'm going to be her social and recording secretary.”

“Jesus, what's that?”

“Daddy, they are the most wonderful people in the world.”

“They?”

“She and Troy. They are the only people I've ever known who are completely free.”

“Free?”

“Free to make their own lives.” Lucy looked up at last.

How little we know our own children! I think I had not looked at her in years. How did I size her up, this little stranger? She was not like her mother. The years would not treat her well. At sixteen she was at her prime; later her face would get heavy in the morning. She was like a child whom voluptuousness had overtaken unawares. By the time she becomes fully aware of it, she will have run to fat. Her own chemistry had played a trick on her and her face was heavy with it. This innocent voluptuousness was the sort—and here I shocked myself—to inspire lewdness in strangers.

“We sat up all night in the motel room talking.”

Then perhaps life was as innocent as that: they sat up all night talking. Margot sick and Lucy talking. Why not?

“About what?”

“Everything. Raine, you know, is deep into I.P.D. Did you know she was president of the national association?”

“No.”

“My job will really be to be recording secretary for I.P.D.”

“What will you learn from that?”

“I've learned more in the last three weeks than I ever learned in my life.”

“What?”

“About myself. What makes me tick. For example, about the lower centers.”

“The
what
?”

“The four lower centers. As opposed to the three higher, consciousness, mind, spirit.”

“You mean you want to go back to California with Raine?”

“I'm going to live with Troy and Raine.”

“I didn't know they were married.”

“They're not. And I'm glad they're not. If they were married, I'd be like a daughter or something. This way we're equals, a threesome, one for all, all for one.”

Is all niceness then or is all buggery? How can a man be forty-five years old and still not know whether all is niceness or buggery? How does one know for sure?

“Have you spoken to your mother? You'll have to have our permission, you know.”

“She's all for it. At least she said so this morning. I hope she's not out of her mind—she said she had a 103-degree fever.”

Then she was sick and all is niceness and not buggery.

“You mean you want to live with Troy and Raine?”

“Yes. Do you want to see their house, rather Raine's house? Isn't that neat?”

From her pocket she took out photos of Raine and of the house, the first inscribed with writing: I could only read
To my little
—Little what? I couldn't make it out. The other showed an English beam-in-plaster mansion and some California plants trimmed to shapes, spheres and rhomboids. It looked like the sort of place where Philip Marlowe called on a rich client and insulted the butler.

“Look at what Raine gave me.”

Opening her housecoat, she showed me a heavy gold cross nestled in the dusky cleft of her young breasts.

“She's the most wonderful person I've ever known.”

She seemed to be. Everyone seemed wonderful. All the town folk thought the movie people wonderful. And in fact they seemed to be.

I think I see now what I am doing. I am reliving with you my quest. That's the only way I can bear to think about it. Something went wrong. If you listen I think I can figure out what it was.

It was a quest all right and a very peculiar one. But peculiar times require peculiar quests.

We've spoken of the Knights of the Holy Grail. Percival. Do you know what I was? The Knight of the Unholy Grail.

In times like these when everyone is wonderful, what is needed is a quest for evil.

You should be interested! Such a quest serves God's cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God. If you had ten thousand Albert Schweitzers giving their lives for their fellow men, do you think anyone would have a second thought about God?

Or suppose the Lowell Professor of Religion at Harvard should actually find the Holy Grail, dig it up in an Israeli wadi, properly authenticate it, carbon date it, and present it to the Metropolitan Museum. Millions of visitors! I would be as curious as the next person and would stand in line for hours to see it. But what difference would it make in the end? People would be interested for a while, yes. This is an age of interest.

But suppose you could show me one “sin,” one pure act of malevolence. A different cup of tea! That would bring matters to a screeching halt. But we have plenty of evil around you say. What about Hitler, the gas ovens and so forth? What about them? As everyone knows and says, Hitler was a madman. And it seems nobody else was responsible. Everyone was following orders. It is even possible that there was no such order, that it was all a bureaucratic mistake.

Show me a single “sin.”

One hundred and twenty thousand dead at Hiroshima? Where was the evil of that? Was Harry Truman evil? As for the pilot and bombardier, they were by all accounts wonderful fellows, good fathers and family men.

“Evil” is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone's either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil.

God may be absent, but what if one should find the devil? Do you think I wouldn't be pleased to meet the devil? Ha, ha. I'd shake his hand like a long-lost friend.

The mark of the age is that terrible things happen but there is no “evil” involved. People are either crazy, miserable, or wonderful, so where does the “evil” come in?

There I was forty-five years old and I didn't know whether there was “evil” in the world.

A small corollary to the above: Is evil to be sought in violence or in sexual behavior? Or is all violence bad and all sexual behavior good, or as Jacoby and Merlin would say, life-enhancing?

If one is looking for evil, why not study war or child-battering? Could anything be more evil? Yet, as everyone knows, mothers and fathers who beat and kill their children have psychological problems and are as bad off as the children. It has been proved that every battered child has battered parents, battered grandparents, and so on. No one is to blame.

As for war, the only time members of my family have ever been happy, brave, successful, was in time of war. What's wrong with war?

Look across the street. Do you see that girl's Volkswagen's bumper sticker: Make Love Not War. That is certainly the motto of the age. Is anything wrong with it?

Yes. Could it be possible that since the greatest good is to be found in love, so is the greatest evil. Evil, sin, if it exists, must be incommensurate with anything else. Didn't one of your saints say that the entire universe in all its goodness is not worth the cost of a single sin? Sin is incommensurate, right? There is only one kind of behavior which is incommensurate with anything whatever, in both its infinite good and its infinite evil. That is sexual behavior. The orgasm is the only earthly infinity. Therefore it is either an infinite good or an infinite evil.

My quest was for a true sin—was there such a thing? Sexual sin was the unholy grail I sought.

It is possible of course that there is no such thing and that a true sin, like the Grail, probably does not exist.

Yet I had the feeling I was on to something, perhaps for the first time in my life. Or at least for twenty years. I was like Robinson Crusoe seeing a footprint on his island after twenty years: Not a footprint but my daughter's blood type. Aha, there is something going on!

So overnight I became sober, clear-eyed, clean, fit, alert, watchful as a tiger at a water hole.

Something was stirring. So Sir Lancelot set out, looking for something rarer than the Grail. A sin.

“Elgin, how would you like to make a movie?”

Elgin smiled. “Merlin axed me already.”

“To be in one. I'm asking about making a movie, not Merlin's. Mine. I'm going to make a movie.”

“You are?”

“And you're going to help me.”

“I am?”

“Elgin, listen.” I walked around the plantation desk and stood hands in pockets looking down at him. He sat perfectly symmetrical, arms resting at an angle across chair arms, fingers laced, gazing straight ahead, a slight smile on his lips. “I'm asking a favor of you. I need someone to help me and only you can do it. There are two reasons for this. One is that only you have the technical ability to help me. The other is that you are one of the two or three people in the world I trust. The others are probably your mother and father. I must tell you that it is a large favor because you will be doing it without knowing why. Although what I'm asking you to do is not illegal, it is just as well you don't know the reasons. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“Okay.” Still avoiding my eye, he answered immediately. It was as if he already knew what I wanted.

“Here's the technical problem. To tell you the truth, I don't know whether it can be solved. Certainly I have no idea of how to go about it.” I took out my floor plan of Belle Isle's second story. “You see these five rooms? Margot's and Raine's on one side of the hall, separated by the chimney and dumb-waiter. On the other side of the hall are these three rooms, Troy Dana's here. Merlin's here, Janos Jacoby's here. They'll be moving back to the house tomorrow as I had anticipated.”

Elgin's eyelids flickered once, when I mentioned Margot's name. Otherwise his expression did not change.

Elgin didn't move, but his eyes went out of focus.

“Now here's what I want. I want a hidden camera mounted in each room and the events which occur in the room between midnight and five o'clock recorded. For one, perhaps two nights. Three nights at the most.”

“No way,” he said at last.

But even as he said it, shaking his head and smiling, he was casting about in his mind—happily. Happy the man who can live with problems! It was this I had counted on of course, that the problem, its sheer impossibility, would engage him immediately so that he would not think two seconds about what I was asking him to do.

Even as he smiled and shook his head, he was casting about. It was the challenge of the thing. He was like a mountain climber, pitoned, rappeled, looking straight up a sheer cliff. It couldn't be climbed. On the other hand, perhaps—