Lancelot (8 page)

Was I still strong? How much abuse will a body take? I looked at my fist. I looked at the plantation desk. Raised chest-high originally so that the busy planter (busy with what?) could write his checks standing up, it had been lowered by Margot to make a regular desk. Good solid inch-thick walnut. I put my fist through the middle of the backboard. It went through. I looked at my fist. The knuckles were bleeding. The pain came through tentatively as if it were not sure it had permission. I thought: It has been a long time since I felt pain. I did ten pushups. My arms trembled; it left me sweating. I tried the Bowie knife test, do you remember? With my right hand I stuck the knife into the soft pecky cypress wall with all my strength. With my left hand I tried to withdraw it without working it to and fro. I could not. Then was my right arm strong or my left arm weak?

For the first time in years I bathed very carefully, scrubbing every inch of my body, washing my hair, cleaning and paring my nails, shaving every hair on my face. The bathwater was gray-black. I took a cold shower, scrubbed myself with a towel till the skin hurt, combed my hair, put on shorts. I lay down on the bricks and took a deep breath. The cold of the bricks penetrated the skin of my thighs. For years, I realized, I had lived in a state of comfort and abstraction, waiting for the ten o'clock news, and had not allowed myself to feel anything. When the base of my lungs filled with air and my viscera moved, I realized that I had been breathing shallowly for years. Lowering my chin, I could see the wide V-shaped flare of my ribs; the abdomen fell away out of sight. There was a cherry mole on my breastbone I had never noticed before. I had not looked at myself for years.

Raising my chin as far as it would go, I could see Margot's painting of Belle Isle upside down. There was a year when Margot painted bayous, Spanish moss, and plantation houses.

I stood up. Can a man stand alone, naked, and at his ease, wrist flexed at his side like Michelangelo's David, without assistance, without diversion, without drink, without friends, without a woman, in silence? Yes. It was possible to stand. Nothing happened. I listened. There was no sound: no boats on the river, no trucks on the road, not even cicadas. What if I didn't listen to the news? I didn't. Nothing happened. I realized I had been afraid of silence.

For the past year or so, I had been walking carefully, eyes straight ahead, like a man favoring a secret wound. There was a secret wound which I had not been able to admit, even to myself. Now I could. It was that lately I had trouble making love to Margot. It was the last thing I expected. For the best thing we'd always had between us was a joyous and instant sex. We also drank and ate a lot as well and it was very good between us. Once we were at a banquet at the Governor's mansion, a meeting of the Landmark Preservation Society, Margot the president at the speaker's table and in a gold lamé gown without underwear (because underwear made lines). She was eating green peas and in a few minutes would make a speech. I caught her eye. In thirty seconds we were in the Governor's bathroom, which wouldn't lock, but her bare ass was against the door, no lock required. Two minutes later husband and wife took their places, wife gave speech, husband ate apple pie.

4

THE FIRST TIME I
ever saw her was something like that. Belle Isle was poor. As a liberal lawyer I wasn't making much money taking N.A.A.C.P. cases. We depended on the tourist dollar. That year we came into a little bonus: we were chosen for the Azalea Trail, ten thousand good middle-class white folks, mostly women, tramped through the house shepherded by belles in hoop skirts. It brought in over five thousand dollars and we needed the money and so put up with the inconvenience: being put out of the house, carpets trampled, plates missing.

Margot was a belle. Her father, Tex Reilly, who had made ten million dollars in mud, had moved to New Orleans to make still more in offshore rigs and so arrived in the Garden District, rich, widowed, and with a debutante-age daughter. He bought a house. What he didn't know was that New Orleans society takes as much pleasure ignoring Texas money as New York money, which was all right with Tex, except that his daughter couldn't be queen of Comus or queen of anything or even a maid—or even go to the balls. He didn't even get far enough to find out that guests don't go to the Mardi Gras balls to dance but only to watch the maskers dance. The Azalea Festival was a different matter. It was a happy marriage of rich new oil people and old broke River Road gentry. If the newcomers couldn't dance with Comus and parade through New Orleans, they could buy old country houses and parade through the rest.

The day was a fiasco. It drizzled, blew, hailed, and finally stormed. But the ladies came anyhow, at least five thousand, leaking water and grinding buckshot mud into our fragile faded Aubussons. The belles stationed on the gallery, a charming bevy, to welcome the visitors, got wet, hair fell, colors ran.

I came home from work, taking the service drive, parked and headed for the back stairs and the roped-off upstairs living quarters with no other thought in mind but to get past the tourists and the belles and the mud and watch the 5:30 news. News! Christ, what is so important about the news? Ah, I remember. We were wondering who was going to get assassinated next. Sure enough, the next one did get killed. There it was, the sweet horrid dread we had been waiting for. It was the late sixties and by then you had got used to a certain rhythm of violence so that one came home with the dread and secret expectation that the pace had quickened, so that when the final act was done, the killing, the news flash: the death watch, the funeral, the killing during the funeral, one watched as one watches a lewd act come to climax, dry-mouthed, lips parted, eyes unblinking and slightly bulging—and even had the sense in oneself of lewdness placated.

In those days I lived for the news bulletin, the interrupted program, the unrehearsed and stumbling voice of the reporter.

As I rounded the corner of the gallery, briefcase swinging out in the turn (what was in the briefcase? A fifth of Wild Turkey and a hard-cover copy of
The Big Sleep
), one belle caught my eye. Or rather her eye caught my eye and I couldn't look away. She was as sopping wet and her colors as run together as the rest but she was not woebegone. She was backed against the plastered brick, hands behind her open to the bricks, backs of hands against her sacrum, bouncing off the wall by ducking her head and pushing with her hands. Under the muddy fringe of her hoop skirt, I could see her feet were bare. Her short hair was in wet ringlets like spitcurls on her forehead, but still springy and stiff at her temples.

“You must be the master.”

“What's that? Eh?”—I must have said, or something as stupid. All I remember is standing holding my briefcase, too dumb to come out of the rain.

“Aren't you the master of Belle Isle?”

“Yes.”

“You must be Lancelot Lamar.”

“That's right.”

“You don't look like I expected”—bouncing and ducking like a thirteen-year-old yet really she was post-debutante, post-belle, twenty-three or -four.

“What did you expect?”

“A rumpled Sid Blackmer or maybe a whining Hank Jones.” They turned out to be actors and it turned out she knew them or said she did. I never heard of them and nowadays don't know one actor from another.

“Who are they?”

“You look more like an ugly Sterling Hayden, a mean Southern black-haired Sterling Hayden in seersuckers.”

“Who is he?”

“Sterling Hayden gone to seed and running a sailor's bar in Macao.”

“He sounds charming.” It wasn't raining hard but I stepped onto the gallery to get out of it. “And
you
are charming. But I am hot and tired and need a drink. I think I'll go through the house.”

“I'm wet and cold and need a drink too.”

I looked at her. She wasn't pretty and she wasn't Scarlett (the other belles were trying to be Scarlett, hoyden smile and so forth, were also unpretty, were, in fact, dogs, what is more, wet dogs …). Her face was shiny and foreshortened—was it the way she tilted her head back to push herself off the wall?—her mouth too wide. Dry, her coarse stiff hair invited the hand to squeeze it to test its spring (how I loved later to take hold of that hair in both hands, grab it by the roots in both fists, and rattle her skull with a surprising joking violence). Raindrops sprang away from it. Her hands were big. As she spoke her name we shook hands for some reason; her hand, coming from behind her, was plaster-pitted and big and warm. The second time we met, at the Azalea Festival reception in New Orleans (I had to go in to get my check for their use of Belle Isle), we shook hands again, and as her hand clasped mine, her forefinger tickled my palm. I was startled. “Does that mean the same thing in Texas that it does in Louisiana?” I asked her. She looked puzzled. As it turned out, it didn't. Her neck was slender, round, and vulnerable but her back was strong and runneled. I'm getting ahead of myself. But what she was or had and what I caught a glimpse of and made me swallow was a curious droll direct voluptuousness, the boyishness being just a joke after all when it came to her looking straight at me. I noticed that her freckles turned plum-colored in the damp and bruised skin under the eye. At the time I didn't know what her darkening freckles meant. Yet I sensed that her freckles were part of the joke and the voluptuousness.

How strange love is! I think I loved you for equally curious reasons: that for all your saturninity, drinking, and horniness, there was something gracile and frail and feminine about you. Sometimes I wanted to grab you and hug those skinny bones—does that shock you? I did hold your arm a lot at first just to feel how thin you were. Later we never touched each other. Perhaps we were too close.

She hugged her bare shoulders and shivered. “I said I could use a drink too.”

I thought a moment.

“My God, what a frown. What lip biting! You look like you're about to address a jury. I like the way you bite your lip when you think.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes, that's right.”

“Come on.” I think I actually took her by the hand. I wanted to hold that warm, pitted hand again! At any rate, it came to pass that for the second or third time in my life, I left life's familiar path—I being a creature of habit even then, doing the same thing day in and day out—took her by one hand, picked up the briefcase with the other, and went back down the service drive and across to the pigeonnier, the farthest place from the tourists, servants, and family, nobody but Ellis using it to store garden tools, and invited her in. Of course it wasn't fixed up then and was dusty and cluttered but dry and pleasant.

“Warm! Dry!” She clapped her hands as I cleared a place among the tools and found an old glider mattress to sit on. “Get me out of this damn thing.” I swear I think she almost said
git
but not really: she was halfway between
git
and
get,
just as she was halfway between Odessa, Texas, and New Orleans.

Damned if the hoop skirt didn't work like chaps! It hooked on behind and came right off and meanwhile she was undoing her jacketlike top and so she stepped forth in pantaloons and bodice—I guess it was a bodice—all run with violet and green dye like a harlequin. I remember wondering at the time: Was it that she looked so good in pantaloons or would any woman look that much better in pantaloons? And also wondering: What got into our ancestors later that, with such a lovely curve and depth of thigh and ass, they felt obliged not to conceal but burlesque both, hang bustle behind and hoops outside? Was it some unfathomable women's folly or a bad joke played on them by men?

She sat, muddy feet touching, knees apart, arms straight out across them, looking up at the ceiling through her eyebrows.

“This was for pigeons?”

“Upstairs. There are still a few. Listen.” Down the iron staircase came the chuckle-coo but it began to rain hard again and we couldn't hear anything.

I opened the briefcase between us and took out the fifth of Wild Turkey 86 proof, as mild as spring sunshine. Margot clapped her hands again and laughed out loud, the first time I ever heard the shouting, hooting laugh she laughed when she was really tickled. “What in the world—!” she addressed the unseen pigeons above us. “Did you
plan
this?”

“No, I can't leave it in the office, the help gets into it.”

“Oh, for heaven's—! My God, what luck. What great good luck. Oh, Scott—” Or something to that effect, I don't quite remember. What I do remember was that in her two or three exclamations my ear caught overtones that overlay her original out-from-Odessa holler (gollee?): a bit of her voice teacher here, a bit of New Orleans there (they were saying Oh Scott that year), a bit of Winston Churchill (great good luck), a bit of Edward VII (at long last). Or was it Ronnie Colman? I had not yet heard her cut loose and swear like an oilfield roughneck.

I took off coat and tie. I smelled of a day's work in an unair-conditioned law office (Christ, I still hate air conditioning. I'd rather sweat and stink and drink ice water. That's one reason I like it here in jail). She smelled of wet crinoline and something else, a musky nose-tickling smell.

I must have asked her what her perfume was because I remember her saying orris root and laughing again: Miss What's-Her-Name, grande dame and ramrod of the Azalea Festival, wanted everything authentic.

“I think I'll have a drink.”

“From the bottle?”

“Yes. If you like I'll get you some ice water.”

When I finished, she upped the bottle, looking around all the while. She swallowed, bright-eyed. “Do you do this every day?”

“I usually take a bath first, then sit on the gallery and Elgin brings me some ice water.”

“Well, this is nice too.”

We drank again in silence. It was raining hard and we couldn't hear the pigeons. The tour buses were turning around, cutting up the lawn, sliding in the mud, their transmissions whining.