Lancelot (19 page)

What else is there really in life, dear Percival, than love, an October day, a slope of levee, warm lips to kiss, and this droll man-woman creature lying beside me who was mostly man driving the car until the moment I kissed her, when all at once she became all woman and I could feel her neck giving way in that sweet flection-extension no man's vertebrae ever managed, and her body of itself and in all its lovely breadth turn toward me on its axis to greet, salute me.

Yes, she loved me then. How do I know? Because at last I woke from my stupor and, remembering what courting was, courted her. In love, I drove to New Orleans to get her out of a Colonial Dames convention (for some reason it was important to her to be a Dame and damned if she didn't haul me to South Carolina to find and photograph the tombstone of her only WASP ancestor (no Reilly in that war! a Johnson—sure enough, a Private Aaron Johnson killed in the Battle of Cowpens!). Into the ballroom of the St. Charles I walked, and up and down the aisle until I spied her in the crowd of two thousand lily-white Dames listening to another Dame talking about preserving U.S. ideals and so forth and, spotting her, signaled her out with a peremptory angling off of head and she came out, at first fearful: Was somebody dead?—then clapped her hands with joy, hugged and kissed me: “Oh, I'm so glad to see you! You came to see me! to get me? Oh oh—”

Being “in love” means that my heart leaped at the sight of her. I felt like clapping my hands too. Why her and no other woman? She had two eyes, a nose, mouth, legs like a billion other women—like a million other good-looking women, yet she acquired for me a priceless value. Elizabeth Taylor, as beautiful as she was then, could have walked by and I wouldn't have looked at her twice. It was almost religious. Things she owned were like saints' relics. The place where she lived with Tex, the big Garden District house, became a shrine—I could drive around and around the block and feel the tingle in my legs when I caught sight of the house—a Taj Mahal which held my live princess.

Was it possible that a man could be so happy on one afternoon and that there were so many afternoons? It was all so simple. We'd drive until we found a pretty place, a stretch of levee, a meadow off the Natchez Trace. We'd walk till we got tired, drink, eat, kiss,
neck
!

A confession: She took the lead the first time. No, not the first. The second. The first was my crude way with her the first time I saw her, barefoot and muddy, at Belle Isle, getting under her hoopskirt and so forth.

That day we had eaten crawfish étouffé and gumbo and drunk two bottles of wine and were full and happy and zooming up the River Road in the October twilight and I was thinking of a place to go to park, maybe even a meadow to lie in. But she just said: “Let's go to bed.” I swallowed hard and felt like saying
gollee
or something like, a thirty-five-year-old man: gollee. Nowadays any eighteen-year-old would laugh at me. Yes, but I notice that young men are not as happy with their girls, at least not as happy as I was. “Do you know a place?” she asked. Happily, I did, in Asphodel, a little tourist cottage in a glen off the Trace. My hand trembled as I registered. She undressed without bothering to turn out the light (as quickly as in the Texaco restroom in Odessa: zip! zip! naked!). She stood naked before the mirror, hands at her hair, one knee bent, pelvis aslant. She turned to me and put her hands under my coat and in her funny way took hold of a big pinch of my flank on each side. Gollee. Could any woman have been as lovely? She was like a feast. She was a feast. I wanted to eat her. I ate her.

That was my communion, Father—no offense intended, that sweet dark sanctuary guarded by the heavy gold columns of her thighs, the ark of her covenant.

I helped her with the windows in the belvedere. It was not a hurricane yet but an ordinary thunderstorm. From this height one could see in the lightning white caps in the river and the far bank. It was like the sea.

She sat on the bench eyes straight ahead like a seasick passenger.

“Margot, let's leave.”

“What?” The storm made a racket.

“Let's get in the car and drive to North Carolina. Right now. The colors are at their height. Siobhan is with Tex, Lucy's going back to school tomorrow.”

She was silent.

“Think of it. We could drive clear of the hurricane, make it to Atlanta by two o'clock.” I was thinking about the moment of entering a motel with her, the moment she always paused at the mirror and raised her hands to her hair. I was also trying to remember the last time I slept with her. How had it happened that we were not sleeping together? What was I doing living in an outhouse? I tried to remember.

“No.” I had to sit close to her to hear for she spoke without raising her voice, eyes staring unfocused and unblinking. “The company is leaving day after tomorrow. We—they—can't afford to lose two or three days to a hurricane. And there's no need really. The two or three interior Belle Isle scenes can be shot anywhere.”

“I know. That's why you can leave.”

“No.” Her
noes
tolled like a bell. Then she said in the same voice, eyes not moving: “Jan needs me to work with him on his screen treatment of
A Doll's House
.”

“A Doll's House?”

“It'll be Jan's first big film—the first he can do exactly as he wants.”

“And you? What's your part in this?”

She misunderstood me. I meant her part with Jacoby. What was he to her, she to him?

“I'm Nora, Lance.” She looked at me for the first time. The storm was closer and the lightning flickered like a strobe light. Her eyes seemed to dart.

“Nora?”

“The lead, remember?”

“Yes, I remember.”

She clapped her hands. “I'm good, Lance! I'm really good. I'm so happy. I've never known what it is to have a talent and to develop it. To function! To function like—a fine watch. Like Olivier or Hepburn.”

“You're putting up the money.”

“Yes, and I'll never make a better investment. Jan's ideas are so exciting. For him cinema is not just another medium. You have to understand communication theory. Cinema is the medium par excellence for our times.”

Cinema. Five years ago she'd have said, Let's go to the movies. And we'd go see Steve McQueen. We'd eat popcorn and when I finished I'd put my buttery fingers between her legs.

“Why do you and Jacoby need to do a script? Isn't Ibsen good enough?”

“You don't understand. We're not primarily interested in ideas as Ibsen was. It is Nora as a person and the narrative. Jan believes—”

“Let's leave right now, Margot. We could drive all night. Do you remember doing that and sleeping in a meadow by the Shenandoah River?”

“No. I owe this to myself. But let me explain. Jan's theory is that by the very nature of the medium cinema should have nothing to do with ideas. The meaning of a film derives from the narrative itself. Narrative and person are everything. What's more, the treatment has to be done before England.”

“England?”

“That's where we're going to shoot it.”

“You mean you're going to England?”

“That's where he's going to shoot it. It will cut costs by half.”

“Then you're going to England?”

“Do you think I'd miss the chance to play Nora?”

“Are you sure you're going to?”

“I just told you—Oh. You mean Jan's going to take my money and kick me out.”

“How does Tex feel about it?” Surely that stupid-shrewd old man could see through this.

“Tex and Siobhan are beside themselves.”

“They're going?”

“Can you see Tex not going?”

“I think you might have told me.”

“Honey, I was going to. We only decided last night.” I was silent for a while. She said: “Don't worry about me being cheated, Lance. You don't know Jan. He's so—”

“Do you?”

“I know him. I know him like a—” She paused.

“A lover?”

“Lover. Of course I love him dearly. I love Bob Merlin. I love you. I love Siobhan. I love Tex. But it's all different.”

“That's not what I mean.”

“Oh boy oh boy oh boy. It's not all that important, you know.”

“What's not?”

“Sex. You men set so much store by it. Well, you flatter yourselves. It's not all that important.”

Why couldn't I ask her what I wanted to know?

“Did you—?”

“What?”

“Nothing.” I couldn't ask.

“I don't mess with anybody and you know it. Believe it or not, I've found something more important than the almighty penis.”

I think I blushed. I wished she wouldn't say penis. It sounded white and bent off. But what would I have her say? dick? pecker? prick? tallywhacker?

Can I explain to you how relieved I was? Relieved to hear her say so easily that she had no lovers? Such off-handedness was worth a hundred oaths. It was true! But what about Siobhan's father? Even science can make mistakes.

But here's the real question. Did I want her guilty or innocent? And if she were guilty and I knew it—and I knew it as surely as I know that my blood type A plus B does not equal Siobhan's 0—why did I want to hear her say it? Why did I believe her denial? Which is better, to have a pain and find no cause or to locate the abscess, loose the pus?

The storm was worse. The belvedere rattled and rocked like the
Tennessee Belle
. Lightning was almost constant. A bolt hit the lightning rod. A blue light rolled along the widow's walk like a ball of yarn.

Margot was frightened. She grabbed me. “Jesus, Lance, we're going to be killed.”

She was scared to death. She wanted to be held. I held her.

“Let's lie down here.”

As suddenly she let go of me. “The bench is too narrow.”

“On the floor.”

“It's wet.”

“Standing up then. I'll hold you up like Dana.”

“That fag.”

“Well—”

“I have to go. I'm dead. Would you believe that acting is more exhausting than ditchdigging?”

Would I believe? I didn't know. But I meant to find out.

Do you think I'm crazy? Look at me.

Do you hear the bluejays and the children crying in the street? The very sound and soul of late after-school afternoons in the fall. Listen. They are singing skip-rope songs.

Charlie Chaplin went to France

To teach the girlies how to dance

And this is the way he taught them:

Hoola hoola

Ponchatoola

Salute to the captain

Bow to the queen

Turn your back on the submarine

Charlie Chaplin sat on a pin

How many inches did it go in?

One, two, three …

They're counting. That's called doing “hots.”

The innocence of children. Didn't your God say that unless you become as innocent as one of those, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven? Yes, but what does that mean?

It is obvious he made a mistake or else played a very bad trick on us. Yes, I remember the innocence of childhood. Very good! But then after a while one makes a discovery. One discovers there is a little secret that God didn't let us in on. One discovers your Christ never did tell us about it. Yet God himself so arranged it that you wake up one fine morning with a great thundering hard-on and wanting nothing more in life than a sweet hot cunt to put it in, drive some girl, any girl, into the ground, and where is the innocence of that? Is that part of the innocence? If so, he should have said so. From child to assailant through no doing of one's own—is that God's plan for us? Damn you and your God. Between the two of you, you should have got it straight and had it one way or the other. Either it's good or it's bad, but whichever it is, goddamn say so. Only you don't. You fuck off somewhere in between. You want to have it both ways: good, but—bad only if—and so forth. Well, you fucked up good and proper, fucked us all up, for sure fucked me up. I'll take the Romans or the old Israelites who didn't worry about women. David had three hundred women but wanted another one. God didn't hold it against him.

There are only three ways to go. One is their way out there, the great whorehouse and fagdom of America. I won't have it. The second way is sweet Baptist Jesus and I won't have that. Christ, if heaven is full of Southern Baptists, I'd rather rot in hell with Saladin and Achilles. There is only one way and we could have had it if you Catholics hadn't blown it: the old Catholic way. I Lancelot and you Percival, the only two to see the Grail if you recall. Did you find the Grail? You don't look like it. Then we knew what a woman should be like, your Lady, and what a man should be like, your Lord. I'd have fought for your Lady, because Christ had the broadsword. Now you've gotten rid of your Lady and taken the sword from Christ.

I won't have it. I won't have it your way or their way. I won't have it your way with your God-bless-everything-because-it's-good-only-don't-but-if-you-do-it's-not-so-bad. Just say whether a sweet hot cunt is good or not. I won't have it your way and I won't have it their way, the new way. A generation stoned and pussy free and devalued, pricks after pussy, pricks after pricks, pussy after pussy. But most of all pussy after pricks. Christ what a country! A nation of 100 million voracious cunts. I will not have my son or my daughter grow up in such a world. When I say I won't have it, I'm serious. I won't have it. I won't have my son … Very well, I will make another confession: My son is a homosexual now and I can understand why. He told me he was terrified of all the pussy after him. All the girls want to fuck and it scared him. Think of it: all those hot little cunts waiting to see if he was up to servicing them. Well, he couldn't, he was too scared. He found it easier, the scared little prick, to be with other scared little pricks. And I can't say I blame him. Now there are four of them, four nice scared young men living happily together in the French Quarter needlepointing Louis Quinze chairs.