Lancelot (18 page)

Then how shall we live if not with Christian love? One will work and take care of one's own. live and let live, and behave with a decent respect toward others. If there cannot be love—you call that love out there?—there will be a tight-lipped courtesy between men. And chivalry toward women. Women must be saved from the whoredom they've chosen. Women will once again be strong and modest. Children will be merry because they will know what they are to do.

Oh, you wish to know what my own life will be like? (Look at you, all at once abstract and understanding and leading me on, all ears like one of these psychologists: why can't you priests stick to being priests for a change?) Very well, I will tell you. I plan to marry Anna here in the next room. I think she'll have me. You can marry us if you like. I shall love and protect her. I can make her well. I know that I can just as I know I can do what I choose to do. She is much better already. Yesterday we watched the clouds flying along and she smiled. She is the first woman of the new order. For she has, so to speak, endured the worst of the age and survived it, undergone the ultimate violation and come out of it not only intact but somehow purged, innocent. Who else might the new Virgin be but a gang-raped social worker? I do not joke. Her ordeal has made her like a ten-year-old.

We shall live in this neighborhood. I like it here. New Orleans is a shabby gentle benign place. We shall buy a small Victorian cottage under the levee and live a simple life.

But we will not tolerate this age. It is not enough to destroy it. We shall build a new order.

Actually, you don't have to worry. Killings will not be necessary. I have discovered something. I've discovered that even in this madhouse if you tell someone something, face to face, with perfect seriousness, without emotion, gazing directly at him, he will believe you. One need only speak with authority. Was not that the new trait that people noticed about your Lord, that he spoke with authority?

The point is, I will not tolerate this age. Millions agree with me and know that this age is not tolerable, but no one will act except the crazies and they are part of the age. The mad Mansons are nothing more than the ultimate spasm-orgasm of a dying world. We are only here to give it the
coup de grâce
. We shall not wait for it to fester and rot any longer. We will kill it.

You are looking at me for a change. Good. At least you are not smiling at me. Yes, I am a patient in a mental hospital, more than that, a prisoner. Yes, I am aware that you are accustomed to the ravings of madmen. Yes, I see you are aware that I give myself a certain license to talk crazy, so to speak. I might even be joking. But I am also aware from a certain wariness in your eyes that you are not absolutely certain I am not serious. You must decide that for yourself.

Why do I tell you this? As a warning. You can issue the warning if you like. There is only a little time. Perhaps a matter of months.
The 69ers
poster had better come down. But of course it will not.

We will not tolerate the way things are.

What's the matter? You look stricken for the first time since you've been coming here. Ha ha, so at last I've gotten a rise out of you.

What did you say? What happened to me?

What do you mean? Do you mean what happened at Belle Isle?

That's in the past. I don't see what difference it makes.

You want to know what happened?

Hm. It's hard to remember. Jesus, let me think. My head aches. I feel lousy. Let me lie down for a while. You don't look so hot either. You're pale as a ghost.

Come back tomorrow.

7

HOW COME YOU'RE WEARING
your priest uniform today? Are you girding for battle or dressed up like Lee for the surrender?

Never mind. I wasn't thinking about you anyway but about Margot.

“You men flatter yourselves,” I remember Margot telling me. “You are not that important to us.”

You men? Us? Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?

Christ, what were we talking about? Oh yes, Percival, you wanted to know what happened? Jesus, what difference does it make? It is the future that matters. Yes, you're right. I did say there was something that still bothered me. What? Sin? The uncertainty that there is such a thing? I don't remember. Anyhow, it doesn't seem very interesting.

What a gloomy day. The winter rains have set in. I understand there is a depression in the Gulf. It's a bit late for hurricanes, isn't it? Isn't it November?

But it would be appropriate, would it not? A hurricane coming now while I tell you about Hurricane Marie a year ago which came while an artificial movie hurricane was blowing down Belle Isle!

Really I should be feeling good if another hurricane is on the way. I used to enjoy hurricanes. Most people do, though they won't admit it, everybody does in fact, except a few sane people, for after all hurricanes are by any sane standard very unpleasant affairs. But what does that prove except that most people today are crazy? I am supposed to be crazy but one sign of my returning sanity is that I don't in the least look forward to hurricanes. I knew a married couple once who were bored with life, disliked each other, hated their own lives, and were generally miserable—except during hurricanes. Then they sat in their house at Pass Christian, put a bottle of whiskey between them, felt a surge of happiness, were able to speak frankly and cheerfully to each other, laugh and joke, drink, even make love. But that is crazy. Why should people be miserable in good weather and happy in bad? Surely not because they are sinners in good weather and saints in bad. True, people help each other in catastrophes. But they don't feel good because they help each other. They help each other because they feel good. No, it's because something has happened to us which is so bad that we don't even have a word for it. Sin isn't the word. Your Christ didn't exactly foresee anything like this, did he? Hurricanes, which are very bad things, somehow neutralize the other bad thing which has no name, so that one can breathe easy, become free once again to sin or not to sin. The couple I spoke of became free and happy only during the passage of the eye of the hurricane, that is, capable of both love and hate (ordinarily they were numb, moved like ghosts), of honesty and lying. It became possible for the husband to say: “Often I secretly wish you were dead. In fact, an hour ago, before the hurricane struck, I was thinking it wouldn't be a bad idea if the hurricane blew away the belvedere and you with it—I'd take my chances.” (Is that a sin?) “In fact I was contemplating my new life as a widower. Not such a bad prospect. Think of the women I could have here in Pass Christian without you around.” A window crashed before the wind, showering them with glass splinters. He looked at the blood. “But now I can honestly say it is good we are together. If you blew away. I'd come after you.” To which the wife replied: “The truth is, I'm bloody tired of cooking and housekeeping for you. If we live through this. I think I'll go out and get a job. Perhaps move out altogether. Then it will be nice to see you in the evenings. We used to have a good time. I liked you. I feel much better in fact. Let's bandage the cuts and have a drink.” They had several drinks. The wind howled and they laughed like children. The house shook like a leaf. They made love in a 160-mile-per-hour gust.

To tell you the truth, it didn't work out for them after all. Or maybe it did. Anyhow, after the hurricane they took a good hard look at each other on a sunny Monday morning and got a divorce.

I found Margot in the belvedere atop Belle Isle battening down the house for Hurricane Marie. She looked surprised to see me, squinting at me during the lightning flashes as if she couldn't place me. It came as a shock to her to see me leave my customary niche in place and time. It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role. I had become for her part of the furniture of Belle Isle, like the console with the petticoat mirror.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, then again looked puzzled to have asked such a strange question. Why shouldn't I be here in my own house?

“What are you doing here?”

“I can't get this dern window down.” The belvedere with its widow's walk outside looked like the passenger cabin of a small ferry. Benches and windows lined the four sides.

Helping her with the window. I found myself thinking how, despite her several transformations, she still had a lot of Texas country girl in her. Even after she became a Southern belle. Mardi Gras matron, chatelaine of Belle Isle, she'd forget and curse like a cowboy—it only took pain, finger caught in station-wagon door: “Shee-it fire!” Or impatience with blacks: “What the hail you think you're doing, boy,” she'd holler at Fluker gaping and goofing off at his sweeping, snatch the broom, and sweep like a frontier wife. Sharp of eye and quick to observe and imitate, she lapsed only in her swear words and her way of disposing of her mucus. Now and then she'd hawk and spit. One time when we were leaving Le Début des Jeunes Filles de Nouvelle Orléans, clear of the door and safe in the dark, she leaned out over the gutter on Royal Street and blew her nose with her fingers, slinging snot expertly. I could imagine her in her senility, dropping all her latter-day guises and cursing and hawking in a nursing home.

She was as quick to pick up the bad manners of the film folk as the good manners of the gentry, yet she did it good-humoredly as if these transformations might be necessary but were not to be taken too seriously. What was surprising was how quickly she got onto the nutty nuances of actors and such. In a matter of weeks she had shed her Texas drawl and picked up the round deracinated bell tone of Raine Robinette, who like June Allyson (Merlin said) came from Washington Heights, even the plaintive up-pitched grace note at the end of each sentence, Raine's trademark, so Merlin had to correct her—she dropped it as quickly—and the actors' way of droning away in their mock enthusiasm for mock projects. Jacoby would go on and on about moving to Louisiana and starting a crawfish farm, going into great detail about the marketing and distribution of this remarkable shellfish, yet do it with a slight gap of inattention even to himself as if he were listening to his voice. What was surprising was how good she was at acting like one of them and how lousy she was at acting the second the cameras rolled.

In the lightning flashes I was looking at her and thinking how much I loved her. “Loved” her? Being “in love.” What does that mean? It means that I lived for love. “Lived for love.” What does that mean? It means simply that she was my happiness and that without her I was not happy. As the saying goes, I didn't know what happiness was until I met her. Do you notice that it is impossible to speak of love without sounding like Tin Pan Alley? But it's the truth nevertheless. I can't live without you. Jesus, is there any other way to say it? I might have been content in my unhappiness if I had not met her, like one of those cave fish that don't have eyes and don't miss the sun.

But if I loved her, why did the discovery of her infidelity cause a pang of pleasure within me?

Before we were married she would drive by my office mid-afternoons and pick me up. She wouldn't take no for an answer.

“But, Margot, I'm bushed”—I, a mole, a creaky, seer-suckered, liberal mole droning out the days with title search, estate succession, and integrating the schools of Feliciana Parish. Perhaps this was what I thought happiness was: keeping the River Road estates intact for the white gentry and evening things up by helping the Negroes.

Off we'd go, up or down the River Road, she driving her little $20,000 Mercedes, top down. I still blinking like a mole in the October sunlight beside her, dusty from the Annotated Louisiana Code, sniffing the German leather warm and fragrant in the sun.

Strange: It was almost as if she were the man, I the woman, so much did she take the lead, work the radio, drive the car like a man, drum her nails on the wheel, gauge the traffic, look swiftly back past me to change lanes, cast ahead in her mind for destination and route. I lumpish and docile in the seat beside her, hands in my lap, like a big dumb coed.

Like a man she was. I said, except that she would tilt her head and cut her eyes over to me, lids narrowed, lips thinned, seriously yet unseriously, as no man ever did. Or, to make herself comfortable in the hot afternoon sun, in a quick second's motion lift her ass off the seat (she could dress in thirty seconds: she told me when she was a child she used to walk to town on Saturday in school clothes and change in the filling station restroom), hike her skirt up exposing her legs. Thought I, goofy from work and drunk on October pine-winey sunlight, catching sight of the sweet heavy convergence of her inner thighs: that is where I want to live, make my habitation.

“Well?” she'd say, driving up on the levee, stopping and leaning over the wheel cradled in her arms (like a man), gaze sideways at me, diamonds of sweat glittering on her upper lip.

Aha! She's parked. What next? I felt a tingling running up the backs of my legs. Is this the way a woman feels, I wondered, when the man parks? Hm. We're parked! What next?

“You know what you are?” she'd ask.

“No, what?”

“A big raunchy Sterling Hayden.”

“Who's he?”

“Sterling Hayden tending bar in Macao, in seersuckers.”

“Is that good?”

They were beautiful October days. Do you know that I made one of the biggest discoveries of my life? It is the simplest of all discoveries but do you know that to this good day I don't know whether I was the last man on earth to make it or whether I was the only man. Was I the dumbest man in the world or the luckiest? It is this: There is a life to be lived and a joy in living it and the joy has nothing to do with our crazy college carryings-on or with my crazy romantic dream of love with Lucy at Highlands. No, it was so much simpler than that. It was simply that there is such a thing as a beautiful day to go out into, a road to travel, good food to eat when you're hungry, wine to drink when you're thirsty, and most of all, 99 percent of all, no:
all
of all: a woman to love.