Lancelot (3 page)

Ah, that does surprise you, doesn't it? Listen to the girl. She's singing.

Freedom's just another word, Lord, for nothing
left to lose
Freedom was all she left for me

Do you believe that? Maybe the girl and I come closer to believing it than you, even though you surrendered your freedom voluntarily and I didn't. Maybe the girl knows more than either of us.

But we were speaking not of astronomical categories but rather of the sexual. A horse of another color, you might say. Well, yes and no. There are certain similarities. Compare the two discoveries. The astronomer sees a dot in the wrong place, makes a calculation, and infers the indisputable: comet on collision course, tidal waves, oceans rising, forests ablaze. The cuckold sees a single letter of the alphabet in the wrong place. From such insignificant evidence he can infer with at least as much certitude as the astronomer an equally incommensurate scene: his wife's thighs spread, a cry, not recognizably hers, escaping her lips. The equivalent of the end of the world following upon the out-of-place dot is her ecstasy inferred from the
O.

Beyond any doubt she was both beside herself and possessed by something, someone? Such considerations have led me to the conclusion that, contrary to the usual opinion, sex is not a category at all. It is not merely an item on a list of human needs like food, shelter, air, but is rather a unique ecstasy, ek-stasis, which is a kind of possession. Just as possession by Satan is not a category. You smile. You disagree? Are you then one of the new breed who believe that Satan is only a category, the category of evil?

Yet how can such portentous consequences be inferred from such trivial evidence? I will tell you if you wish to know, but first I want to report my own reaction to my discovery, which was, to say the least, the strangest of all. You would think, wouldn't you, that the new cuckold would respond with the appropriate emotion—shock, shame, humiliation, sorrow, anger, hate, vengefulness, etc. Would you believe me when I tell you that I felt none of these emotions? Can you guess what I did feel?
Hm. What's this? What have we here? Hm.
What I felt was a prickling at the base of the spine, a turning of the worm of interest.

Yes, interest! The worm of interest. Are you surprised? No? Yes? One conclusion I have reached here after a year in my cell is that the only emotion people feel nowadays is interest or the lack of it. Curiosity and interest and boredom have replaced the so-called emotions we used to read about in novels or see registered on actors' faces. Even the horrors of the age translate into interest. Did you ever watch anybody pick up a newspaper and read the headline
PLANE CRASH KILLS THREE HUNDRED
? How horrible! says the reader. But look at him when he hands you the paper. Is he horrified? No. he is interested. When was the last time you saw anybody horrified?

Yet not even my sad case seems to interest you. Are you listening? What do you see down in the cemetery? The women getting ready for All Souls' Day? whitewashing the tombs, trimming the tiny lawns, putting out chrysanthemums real and plastic, scrubbing the marble lintels. Catercornered from the cemetery if you look close is what used to be the Negro entrance to the old Majestic Theater, now Adult Cinema 16. Remember going there when we came to New Orleans? We used to see movies like
The 49ers
with—who? Vera Hruba Ralston (the hubba hubba girl) and Charles Starrett, or was it Veronica Lake and Preston Foster? Or Robert Preston and Virginia Mayo? Now they're showing something called
The 69ers.
From here all you can make out of the poster is a kind of vague yin-yang, showing, I guess, a couple, as if Charles and Vera Hruba had got caught in the vortex of time and gone whirling yin-yanged down the years.

Across the street you can make out the blackboard of La Branche's Bar. What's the specialty today? Gumbo? Oyster po' boys, shrimp soup? And Dixie draught.

New Orleans! Not a bad place to spend a year in prison—except in summer. Imagine being locked up in Birmingham or Memphis. What is it I can smell, even from here, as if the city had a soul and the soul exhaled an effluvium all its own? I can't quite name it. A certain vital decay? A lively fetor? Whenever I think of New Orleans away from New Orleans. I think of rotting fish on the sidewalk and good times inside. A Catholic city in a sense, but that's not it. Providence, Rhode Island, is a Catholic city, but my God who would want to live in Providence, Rhode Island? It's not it, your religion, that informs this city, but rather some special local accommodation to it or relaxation from it. This city's soul I think of as neither damned nor saved but eased rather, existing in a kind of comfortable Catholic limbo somewhere between the outer circle of hell, where sexual sinners don't have it all that bad, and the inner circle of purgatory, where things are even better. Add to that a flavor of Marseilles vice leavened by Southern U.S.A. good nature. Death and sex treated unseriously and money seriously. The Whitney Bank is as solemn as the cemetery is lively. Protestants started Mardi Gras, you know. Presbyterians take siestas or play gin at the Boston Club. Jews ride on carnival floats celebrating the onset of Christ's forty-day fast.

I like your banal little cathedral in the Vieux Carré. It is set down squarely in the midst of the greatest single concentration of drunks, drugheads, whores, pimps, queers, sodomists in the hemisphere. But isn't that where cathedrals are supposed to be? It, like the city, has something else even more comforting to me, a kind of triumphant mediocrity. The most important event which occurred here in all of history was the John L. Sullivan–Jim Corbett fight. Three hundred years of history and it has never produced a single significant historical event, one single genius, or even a first-class talent—except a chess player, the world's greatest. But genius makes people nervous, including the genius, so he quit playing chess and began worrying about money like everyone else. It is altogether in keeping that the famous Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war was over and was without significance.

After the terrible events at Belle Isle, a year of non-events in a place like this is a relief. There is a sense here of people seriously occupied with small tasks. We, you and I, our families, were different from the Creoles. We lived from one great event to another, tragic events, triumphant events, with years of melancholy in between. We lost Vicksburg, got slaughtered at Shiloh, fought duels, defied Huey Long, and were bored to death between times. The Creoles have the secret of living ordinary lives well. A hundred years from now I don't doubt that women like those out there will be scrubbing the tombs on All Souls' Day, a La Branche will be polishing his bar, and a dirty movie will be playing across the street.

But in order for you to understand what happened at Belle Isle and why I am here, you must understand exactly how it was that day a year ago. I was sitting in my pigeonnier as snug as could be, the day very much like today, the same Northern tang in the air, but utterly still, sun shining, sky as blue as Nebraska cornflowers, not a cloud in the sky. I was reading a book. Yet even before I glanced down at my desk and discovered my wife's infidelity, there was something odd about the day. You will understand this because we, you and I, used to have a taste for the odd and the whimsical.

For now that I've thought about it, things were a little odd even before my interesting discovery. There I sat in my pigeonnier, happy as could be, master of Belle Isle, the loveliest house on the River Road, gentleman and even bit of a scholar (Civil war, of course), married to a beautiful rich loving (I thought) wife, and father (I thought) to a lovely little girl; a moderate reader, moderate liberal, moderate drinker (I thought), moderate music lover, moderate hunter and fisherman, and past president of the United Way. I moderately opposed segregation. I was moderately happy. At least at the moment I was happy. But not for the reasons given above. The reason I was happy was that I was reading for perhaps the fourth or fifth time a Raymond Chandler novel. It gave me pleasure, (no, I'll put it more strongly: it didn't just give me pleasure, it was the only way I could stand my life) to sit there in old goldgreen Louisiana under the levee and read, not about General Beauregard, but about Philip Marlowe taking a bottle out of his desk drawer in his crummy office in seedy Los Angeles in 1933 and drinking alone and all those from-nowhere people living in stucco bungalows perched in Laurel Canyon. The only way I could stand my life in Louisiana, where I had everything, was to read about crummy lonesome Los Angeles in the 1930's. Maybe that should have told me something. If I was happy, it was an odd sort of happiness.

But it was odder even than that. Things were split. I was physically in Louisiana but spiritually in Los Angeles. The day was split too. One window let onto this kind of October day, blue sky, sun shining, children already building Christmas bonfires on the levee from willows their fathers had cut on the batture. The other window let onto a thunderstorm. My wife's friend's film company had set up a thunderstorm machine in the tourist parking lot where ordinarily cars from Michigan, Indiana, Ohio would be parked while rumpled amiable bemused Midwesterners paid their five dollars and went gawking through the great rooms as foreign to them as Castel Gandolfo (never, surely, in history were there ever a stranger pair than those victors and us vanquished). A propeller on a tower blew rain on the south wing of Belle Isle, whitening the live oaks, and the thunder machine thundered, a huge stretch of sheet metal with a motor and a padded eccentric cam. They were trying it out. A scene in the movie required a hurricane. The propeller roared like a B-29, wind and rain lashed Belle Isle, the live oaks turned inside out, Spanish moss tore loose, the sheet metal thundered. But on the other side of the pigeonnier the sun shone serenely.

Margot had told me about it but I didn't pay much attention. The movie was about some people who seek shelter in the great house during a hurricane, a young Cajun trapper, a black sharecropper, a white sharecropper, A Christlike hippy, a Klan type, a beautiful half-caste but also half-wit swamp girl, a degenerate river rat, the son and daughter of the house, even though there are no sharecroppers or Cajuns or even a swamp hereabouts and river rats disappeared with the fish in the Mississippi years ago. And I don't even know what a “half-caste swamp girl” is. I am still unclear about the plot. The Negro sharecropper and the redneck's father, who seem at first to hate each other, form an unlikely alliance to protect the women of the house against rapists of both races. With the help of the Christlike hippy, white and black discover their common humanity. There was something too about the master of the house trying to steal the sharecropper's land, which has oil under it. My only contribution to the story discussions was to point out that the land could not belong to the sharecropper if he was a sharecropper.

The five o'clock whistle at Ethyl blew. I put the book down face up on my desk. It was the plantation desk Margot had given me, built high so a planter in a hurry could write a check standing up. I don't think those fellows ever sat down and wrote a letter or read a book. She had the legs cut off to make an ordinary desk. My eyes fell off the print to a piece of paper beside the book. I remember everything! I even remember the passage in the Chandler novel. Marlowe was looking for a man named Goodwin. He walked into a house in a canyon between Glendale and Pasadena. An
English
bungalow! in Pasadena! Don't you like that? A pleasant incongruity absolutely congruous in Los Angeles. Goodwin was living there alone. Where could Goodwin have come from? I was trying to imagine Goodwin's childhood, Goodwin twelve years old in Fort Wayne before his parents moved to California. Try to imagine someone in Los Angeles with a childhood. Inside the house Goodwin was dead, a bullet through his forehead. My eye slid off his name—I remember it because his first name was Lancelot like mine—onto the paper next to it. It was my daughter's application to a horse camp in West Texas. Margot had filled it in and left it for me to sign. Siobhan I thought was too young for a horse camp—yes, my daughter is named Siobhan. My wife Margot was born Mary Margaret Reilly of Odessa, Texas, so our daughter was named Siobhan. This was a special Montessori horse camp and Margot insisted (“I was raised on a ranch in West Texas and I am not about to have her miss it”). I didn't like the idea of her fooling with horses, great stupid iron-headed beasts, but I always gave in to Margot. I reached for the pen to sign the application and the medical waiver and my eye slid over the page to the letter
O.
No, it was not the letter
O
but the number 0, cipher, zero. It was her blood type, I-0. I read the medical examination. At the least the camp people were careful. In case a child got kicked in an artery, they had her blood type. I-0.

I was looking at it idly. The thunder machine stopped. My head felt a little giddy but not unpleasant, as if I were dislocated and weightless in space—sliding instantaneously from an English bungalow in a Los Angeles canyon to an artificial hurricane to an absolutely still cool clear day in Louisiana. Once in a while an empty sugar-cane truck rumbled down the River Road.

Then it was that the worm of interest turned somewhere near the base of my spine. Curious. What was curious? The star dot was slightly out of place. But what was out of place here? I didn't know yet. Or did I? At any rate, I found myself climbing the iron staircase to the pigeon roost proper. There I kept my regular office equipment, file cabinets, typewriter, and so forth, which Margot didn't like downstairs where she liked to think of me as Jeff Davis writing his memoirs. Not having much to do over the years, I'd kept perfect records of what little I had done. Would you believe that I became meticulous? I'd have made a good C.P.A. Better a good C.P.A. than a half-assed lawyer. There in the file cabinet I found what I had not until that moment quite realized I was looking for: my medical discharge from the army. Sir Lancelot, as you called me, Percival, discharged from the army not bloody and victorious and battered by Sir Turquine but with persistent diarrhea. The army gave me the shits and couldn't cure me. Three months in Walter Reed, the best doctors in the world, twenty thousand dollars worth of medical care, and they couldn't cure the simple shits. So I came home to Louisiana, in August, sat in the rocking chair on the gallery of Belle Isle, downed a great slug of bourbon, and watched the river boats. Sweat popped out on my head and I felt fine.