Lancelot (27 page)

“Ah,” said the beast.

Then lightly I let myself down on it, the beast. It was breathing hard and complexly, a counterpointed respiration. I was breathing hard too. The methane had reached the bed.

Suddenly it, the beast, went very quiet, all at once watchful and listening and headed up like a wildebeest catching a scent. Its succubus back, Margot's, was still arched and I could barely reach around its thick waist and clasp my hands together.

Squeezed together, the beast tried to break apart.

“What in the—?” said Janos Jacoby.

“Oh my God,” said Margot, muffled, but instantly knowing everything.

Mashed together, the two were never more apart, never more themselves.

I was squeezing them, I think, and breathing hard but feeling very light and strong, so light that I imagined that if I had not held them I would float up to the ceiling. Do you remember how we discovered “red-outs,” how if you squeezed somebody from behind hard enough, first they became high, then saw red, then became unconscious. I could squeeze anybody on the team unconscious, even Fats Molydeux from Mamou, who weighed 310.

It is possible that I said something aloud. I said: “How strange it is that there are no longer any great historical events.” In fact, that was what I was musing over, that it seemed of no great moment whether I squeezed them or did not squeeze them.

“How strange it is that there are no longer any great historical events,” I said.

At any rate, it is certain that after a while Janos gasped, “You're not killing me, you're killing her.”

“That's true,” I said and let go. He was right. I had been pressing him into Margot's softness. He was as hard as a turtle and not the least compressed by the squeezing but she had passed out. But no sooner had I let go, and more quickly than I am telling you, than he had leaped up and begun doing things to me, California-kung-fu-karate tricks, knee to my groin, thumb in my eye, heel-of-hand chops to my Adam's apple, and so forth. I stood musing. There were many clever and scrappy moves against my person which I duly and even approvingly registered.”A bed is no place to fight,” I said and we flew through the air until we crashed into the armoire. Janos must have found the knife in my game pouch where it had cut through me cloth and which I had forgotten, for when we broke apart at the armoire, he had it in his hand and was making wary circling movements, feinting and parrying like a scrappy movie star being put to the blood test by Apaches.

“Ah now,” I said with relief, advancing on him, rejoicing in the turn events were taking. “Ah.” A fight! A fight is a simple event. Getting hurt in a fight is not bad. I was backing him toward the cul-de-sac between the armoire and the corner. When he felt the wall behind him, he made a quick California move, whirled, cut my shoulder with the knife, and kicked me in the throat. I couldn't breathe but it didn't matter much because we were breathing methane anyway. After he whirled he must have also thrown the knife, for the flat of the blade hit my chest and the handle came to hand as neatly as if it were a trick we planned. Again I was embracing his back. This time I was more aware of his nakedness and his vulnerability. Here he was in my arms, a mother's boy, not really athletic despite his kung-fu skill, but somewhat pigeon-breasted and not used to being naked and smelling of underarm and Ban. So he might have appeared, an Italian boy, a Jewish boy, naked and vulnerable at the army induction center in the Bronx. He was not used to being naked. Did it ever occur to you that we spent a lot of time naked, naked in the locker room, naked in the river swimming, naked taking sunbaths on the widow's walk? Naked, he was more naked than we ever were.

We were on the floor. My thighs clasped his in a scissors grip.

“For Christ's sake, what are you doing?”

“Nothing much.”

“That's something I'd like to talk about,” he said panting hard yet speaking quickly and sincerely.

“What?”

“The absurdity of life. I've sensed you were into that.”

“Ah.”

“What?”

“Yes,” I said marveling over his actor's gift of getting onto the way people talk. For I could recognize my voice in his, the flat giddy musing tone. He had observed me after all. Were we both drunk on methane or was it the case that in fact there were no “great moments” in life? Or both?

“Let's talk. There's one thing I always wanted to ask you.”

“Yes?”

“It has to do with something I've always desperately wanted in my life. I think you want it too.”

“Yes?”

“I want—”

We'll never know what he wanted because his head was bending back and I was cutting his throat, I think. No, I'm sure. What I remember better than the cutting was the sense I had of casting about for an appropriate feeling to match the deed. Weren't we raised to believe that “great deeds” were performed with great feelings—anger, joy, revenge, and so on? I remember casting about for the feeling and not finding one. Yet I am sure the deed was committed, because his voice changed. His voice dropped a foot from his mouth to his windpipe and came out in a rush, not a word, against my hand holding the knife. He was still under me and there was no feel of the heat of blood on my hand, only the rush and bubble of air as the knife went through the cartilage. I held him for a while until the warm air stopped blowing the hairs on the back of my hand. Yes, I feel certain that is what happened.

Standing by the bed, I gazed down at Margot. I do not remember the storm. She was not dead, not even unconscious. She was watching me, I think. The kerosene light made her cheekbones look wide, an Indian's cheekbones. Her eyes were pools of darkness. They were open, I think. How could I be sure? I sat on the bed and with my arm across her put her cheek to my face. She was breathing. When she blinked, her eyelashes stirred the air against my cheek. In the midst of the hurricane I felt this minuscule wind her eyelashes made against my cheek. She said something. I felt her diaphragm move under my arm.

“What?”

“What are we going to do?” She spoke in my ear. “Is he—?”

“Yes.”

“Oh no,” she said in simple dismay as if Suellen had dropped her best Sèvres vase.

Margot, unlike me, had a feeling but not a remarkable one. It was dismay that things had gotten out of hand. Perhaps the house had begun to break up under the force of the wind. We had better do something about it.

“What are we going to do?”

“We?”

“You.”

“I don't know.”

“Oh oh oh,” she said, taking one hand in the other and actually wringing it. “Is there anything I can do? Oh my God.”

“You could have.”

“Me. Just me?”

“Yes.”

“Why me?”

“Because I loved you.” That was true enough I knew even though I couldn't remember what it was to love her.

“Loved? Love?” she asked.

“Because you were the only person who knew how to turn it all into love.”

“Love?”

“Sweetness dearness innocence singing laughing. ‘Love.'”

“Laughing?”

“That may have been your secret. You had a way of laughing.”

“Yes, I know. I'll tell you what.”

“What?”

“Take your weight off me a little. I can't breathe.”

“Neither can I. I'm not on you. It's not the weight.”

“Oh, God. What is wrong? I can't breathe.”

“Don't worry about that. It's the storm.”

“I tell you what, Lance.”

“What?”

“Let's go away.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. We can start a new life. I'm the only one who can make you happy.” It is strange but she spoke offhandedly now, as if nothing mattered a great deal. She too knew that there are no longer any “great historical moments.” She even took hold of the fabric of my hunting jacket and in her old way plucked a loose thread from it.

“That's true.”

“I know that I know how to and you know that I know how to.”

“Yes.”

It was true.

We must have been poisoned by the methane because the roaring of the storm was inside my head and I could hardly hear her. She was delirious. She was talking again, but not even to me any longer, about being a child in the Texas countryside and walking to town Saturdays and taking her good shoes along in a paper bag. She would change shoes at the bridge and hide the old shoes in a culvert.

“I'm nothing—” she began. “What's the matter with me?”

“What?”

“That's what you never knew. With you I had to be either—or—but never a—uh—woman. It was good for a while. Oooh. Everything's gone black. I'm dying.”

“No. The lamp went out.”

I sat on the bed thinking: How could the lamp go out? To this day I don't know. Perhaps the wick was too low.

“Wait,” I told her and crawled on all fours to get it. Why did I say that to her? Wait. Because I wanted her to tell me how we could do it, start all over again? But not in a serious way. Yes. I was delirious too. I had forgotten about the methane and was thinking of planning a trip with her.

Before I lit the lamp, I sat on the floor, the lamp between me and the bed. my back against the outer wall.

“Do you really think—” I said, turning up the wick, and struck the match. For a tenth of a second I could see her in the flaring, lying on her side like Anna, knees drawn up, cheek against her hands pressed palms together, dark eyes gazing

Without a sound the room flowered. All was light and air and color and movement but not a sound. I was moved. That is to say, for the first time in thirty years I was moved off the dead center of my life. Ah then, I was thinking as I moved, there are still great moments. I was wheeling slowly up into the night like Lucifer blown out of hell, great wings spread against the starlight.

I knew everything. I even knew what had happened. Belle Isle had blown up. Why, I wondered, wheeling, hadn't Raine's room blown first? Was it because the duct was much smaller there or because I had left the chimney on the lamp?

I must have been blown through the wall, with the wall, because I came down on the outer sloping thicket of the great oak where the limb swept to the ground, touched, and came up again. When I came to myself, the fire was hot against my cheek. But there was no great inferno. The roof and upper floors were gone and what flame there was was blown flat and in places separate from the building like the flame of a Bunsen burner. The south wind of the hurricane blew the heat away from me. I felt myself. Nothing was broken. I looked at myself. My hand and shoulder were bloody. I did not feel bad. I stood up, for some reason put my hands in my pockets, and walked up the front steps as I had done ten thousand times before. The heat, carried away by the wind, was not great. Perhaps I had been unconscious a long time. Most of the walls of the ground floor were down. There was no second floor.

What did you say? How did I get burned?

I had to go back to find the knife.

9

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL DAY!
Don't you think so? The last day of the hurricane season. All danger of hurricanes past. The morning sun bright and high refracted through the clear crystal prism of northern air with that special moderation, the promise of warmth, of fine November days in New Orleans. Everything is mild and unexceptional here, isn't it? even the weather. By eleven o'clock the winos on Camp Street will be creeping out of their holes and stretching out or curling up like cats in sunny doorways to take a little nap. Not a bad life.

Stop pacing up and down. I'm the prisoner, not you. Why the long race, the frowning preoccupation? Look at the street. Even the cemetery, especially the cemetery, looks cheerful. The mums are still fresh and yellow. The tombs spick-and-span, the rain trees bright as new copper pennies. Yesterday young people were singing in the old section. Some of them even sleep in the oven crypts, shove the bones aside and unroll their sleeping bags, a perfect fit. An odd thing about New Orleans: the cemeteries here are more cheerful than the hotels and the French Quarter. Tell me why that should be, why two thousand dead Creoles should be more alive than two thousand Buick dealers?

Ah, I forgot to tell you my good news. I'm leaving today. They're discharging me. Psychiatrically fit and legally innocent. I can prove I am sane. Can you? Why do you look at me like that? You don't think they should? Well, in any case, my lawyer got a writ of habeas corpus and my psychiatrist says I'm fit as a fiddle, saner in fact than he—the poor man is overworked, depressed, and lives on Librium.

Just think of it! At noon I shall walk through the front door of this building for the first time in a year, stroll down that block of Annunciation Street I've studied so minutely, turn the corner of Tchoupitoulas, and read that sign there.

Free &
Ma
B

At last I shall know what it says.

Then I shall turn around and look back at this window, reversing the direction of a million looks the opposite way.

It is not a small thing to look back at the place where one has spent a year of one's life.

Then I shall cross the street to La Branche's (formerly Zweig's) Bar and Grill, enter the cool ammoniac gloom where Zweig, La Branche. is mopping the floor of small hexagonal bathroom tile, sit at the bar, and order a Dixie draught and an oyster po' boy.

Then I shall pick up my little suitcase, which contains my worldly possessions, a change of underwear, one suit, socks, sweater. Bowie knife, and boots, walk to St. Charles, catch the streetcar to Canal Street, close out my bank account at the Whitney (about $4,000), walk to the Union Terminal, and catch the Southerner to Richmond. Think of that. Rocking along through the lonesome pine barrens of Mississippi in this two hundredth anniversary year of the first Revolution into the old red clay cuts of Alabama, gliding into Peachtree Station in Atlanta in the evening, order a few drinks in the club car while the train rambles north in the Georgia twilight. Then off at Richmond in the cold dawn hours and catch a Greyhound for the mountains.