Lancelot

by Walker Percy

  And there is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.

  Do you know what jealousy is? Jealousy is an alteration in the very shape of time itself. Time loses its structure. Time stretches out. She isn’t here. Where is she? Who is she with? There is so much time. The minutes and hours creep by. What is she doing? She could be doing anything. She was not here. Her not being here was like oxygen not being here. What am I going to do with the rest of the day? Something tightened in my chest.

  Elgin came in with a clipboard and sat across my desk looking both wary and pleased. When he put on his black horn-rimmed glasses, his hand trembled slightly. He looked like a smart student facing an important examination. I noticed he was dressed unusually, in what I took to be his school clothes, neat belted-in-the-back jeans, white shirt, narrow black tie. Had it been a problem for him to decide how he would appear? as house servant? tour guide? private eye? smart student?

  I had been sitting in my pigeonnier watching boys build a bonfire on the levee. They started before Thanksgiving, cutting willows in the batture to make twenty-foot-high tepees which burn all night Christmas eve, making a great flaming crescent the whole length of English Turn like the campfires of a sleeping army.

  It was not Margot I was thinking about but time, what to do with time. Sober, free of smoke and nicotine for the first time in years, my body cells tingled, watchful and uneasy. What next? What’s coming up? My tongue was ready to taste, my muscles were ready to contract, my liver hummed away, my genitals prickled. Then I realized why I drank and smoked. It was a way of dealing with time. What to do with time? A fearful thing: a human body of ten billion cells ready to do any one of ten billion things. But what to do?

  The empty tape was spinning past the tape head.

  “Ahem.” Elgin cleared his throat. I gave a start. “What do you—”

  “Oh. Is that the log you kept last night?”

  “Yes, sir.” Then he had felt the need to take on some guise or other. But which? house servant? private eye?

  “Why don’t you just read it, Elgin?”

  That helped. Now he could prop clipboard against crossed knee, push his glasses up his nose with his thumb.

  “One-forty a.m. Subjects left Oleander Room.” He looked up. “They stood by the vending machines talking for ten minutes.”

  “They? Who were they?”

  “Miss Lucy.” Miss Lucy? He had never called her that. I saw that he felt a need to put a distance between himself and this business (though he was also proud of what he had done). In his nervousness he had put the greatest distance he could think of: he had retreated to being an old-time servant.

  “Go ahead.”

  “One-fifty. Miss Lucy and Miss Margot to room 115, Miss Raine’s room.”

  “Never mind the Misters and Misses.”

  “Okay. Troy Dana to room 118, his room. Merlin to 226, Jacoby to 145.

  “Two-twelve a.m. Miss Margot leave 115 and go to 226.” For Margot he still needed the Miss.

  “Merlin’s room?”

  “Yes, sir. Two-twenty-five. Troy Dana leave 118 and go to 115.”

  “Raine’s room. That puts Troy, Lucy, and Raine in 115.”

  “Yes, sir. Two-fifty-one a.m. Miss Margot leave” (leave not leaves: he was nervous) “226 and go to 145.”

  “Jacoby’s room?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go on.”

  “Five-oh-four a.m. Lucy leave 115 in a hurry, running like, go out. To her car.”

  “Yes?”

  “Five-fourteen. Troy Dana also leaves 115, goes to 118, his room.” Leaves. He was calmer.

  “Okay.”

  “Five-twenty-four. Miss Margot leaves 145, goes out. To her car. Oh, I forgot. Three-five. Jacoby went out for a glass of water.” He looked up. “I think Miss Margot was sick.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s all.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes, sir. You told me to leave at daylight.” Feeling better, he shoved up the bridge of his glasses with his thumb. I could imagine his students years later, taking him off, doing a school skit imitating his doing this.

  Ha. Maybe she was sick!

  I remember thinking how odd Elgin was, switching back and forth from house nigger to young professor.

  “Okay. That does it. Very good. Thanks, Elgin.”

  Relieved, he swiftly got to his feet.

  “No, wait.” I had already known what I was going to do. And how I was going to deal with it, time coming at me and ten billion cells tingling, waiting.

  He sat down slowly. I picked up the telephone and called my cousin Laughlin at the Holiday Inn. Elgin, simply curious now, watched me.

  “Lock, I need a favor.” I could ask. I had loaned him the money, Margot’s money, to build the motel.

  “Sho, Lance. Just you ask.”

  He was too quick and ingratiating. Gratitude, as well it might, made him uneasy. I could see him sitting at his desk: his clean short-sleeved shirt, neat receding hair turning brown-gray, Masonic ring on finger, hand on socks with clocks, short body just slightly fat, a simple shape like a balloon blown up just enough to smooth the wrinkles. He looked like the president of the Optimists Club, which in fact he was. A doomed optimist. The only difference between Laughlin and me was that Laughlin had not even had his youthful moment of glory. Instead he had had twenty or thirty jobs in the past twenty or thirty years, at each of which he had not exactly failed (for he was earnest and if he was stupid it was in some mysterious self-defeating way which not even he was aware of) but rather completed what he set out to do. He lost interest, the job ran out, the company went out of business, people stopped buying bicycles, sugar tripled in price and ruined his Nabisco distributorship. Now he answered too quickly. Two things made him nervous: one, that he owed me a favor; the other, that he was succeeding. Success terrified him.

  “Just you ask, Lance,” he said, gaining confidence from my hesitation.

  “I want you to close the motel for a few days.”

  “What’s that again?” he asked quickly.

  “Just say they’re going to cut your gas off temporarily as in fact they might. As you know, most of our gas has got to go to New England.”

  “I know but—close the motel? Why?”

  “I’ll pay you full occupancy even though you’re only half full. It should be for two or three days.”

  “But tomorrow’s Tuesday.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Rotary.”

  “I mean the rooms. Go ahead and have Rotary.”

  “Why do you want to close the rooms?”

  I fell silent. Four boys on the levee were tilting up a tall shorn willow like the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Elgin was watching me, the old Elgin now, big-eyed and unmindful of himself.

  “I want all those film people out. They’re almost finished. If they leave there, they’ll have to get out.”

  “Oh.” Oh, I see, he meant. I was counting on his misapprehension and let it stand. “I don’t blame you.”

  “For what?”

  He trod carefully. “For wanting to keep an eye on ’em. I’ve seen a lot of things in this business.” He’d managed a motel in the French Quarter for a year. “You talk about humbug! But—”

  “But what?”

  “As long as they don’t tear up the furniture or burn the beds or stink up the place with pot, I don’t care who does what to who. You wouldn’t believe some of the things—college kids are the worst.”

  He was either stupid or tactful and I do believe it was the latter. We talked easily, deplored college kids and the vicissitudes of the motel business.

  “Okay, Lock?”

  “Let’s see. It’s three-thirty. Too late to close today. But I’ll put a notice in each box to be out by check-out time tomorrow.” He warmed up to it. “As a matter of fact, they’ve been talking about cutting off my gas. How do you like
that! New York City is going to get our gas! And that means no heat or air conditioning in the rooms. Don’t worry about a thing.” For once, his mournful gratitude gave way to good cheer. It was as if he had repaid his loan. “I don’t even care. I’m changing to propane. Do you know what my gas bill was last month?”

  “Thank you, Lock.”

  Elgin watched me as I hung up. Something had given him leave to relax and be himself.

  “Elgin, there are some other things you and only you can do for me.”

  “I’ll do them.”

  In my new freedom I remember thinking: If one knows what he wants to do, others will not only not stand in the way but will lend a hand from simple curiosity and amazement.

  “Okay. You recall the other day we were speaking about the chimney hole and the dumbwaiter?”

  “Yes.” All ears now.

  “All right. Look.” Taking his log from the clipboard, I turned it over and began to draw a floor plan. “I’m making two assumptions. One is that they’ll move back into Belle Isle when they leave the motel tomorrow. There’s nowhere else to go.”

  “Right.”

  “Then I’m assuming they’ll move back into the same rooms at Belle Isle they had before.”

  “Yes. They left their clothes there.”

  “Merlin here on one side of the chimney, Jacoby here on the other. But Margot’s and Lucy’s, Dana’s and Raine’s rooms are across the hall. That presents a technical problem.”

  “Technical problem?”

  “Tell me something, Elgin. How would you like to make a movie?”

  “Movie? What kind of movie?”

  “A new kind of cinéma vérité.” I picked up the pencil. “Here’s where you can help me. There are a few technical problems.”

  Christ, here’s my discovery. You have got hold of the wrong absolutes and infinities. God as absolute? God as infinity? I don’t even understand the words. I’ll tell you what’s absolute and infinite. Loving a woman. But how would you know? You see, your church knows what it’s doing: rule out one absolute so you have to look for another.

  Do you know what it’s like to be a self-centered not unhappy man who leads a tolerable finite life, works, eats, drinks, hunts, sleeps, then one fine day discovers that the great starry heavens have opened to him and that his heart is bursting with it. It? She. Her. Woman. Not a category, not a sex, not one of two sexes, a human female creature, but an infinity. . What else is infinity but a woman become meat and drink to you, life and your heart’s own music, the air you breathe? Just to be near her is to live and have your soul’s own self. Just to open your mouth on the skin of her back. What joy just to wake up with her beside you in the morning. I didn’t know there was such happiness.

  But there is the dark converse: not having her is not breathing. I’m not kidding: I couldn’t get my breath without her.

  What else is man made for but this? I can see you agree about love but you look somewhat ironic. Are we talking about two different things? In any case, there’s a catch. Love is infinite happiness. Losing it is infinite unhappiness.

  So far so good, you say, somewhat ironically, I notice. A man falls in love with a lovely lusty woman, so what else is new? But can you imagine what it’s like to love a lovely lustful woman who lusts but not for you?

  Quite a discovery.

  The truth is, it never crossed my mind in my entire sweet Southern life that there was such a thing as a lustful woman. Another infinite imponderable. Infinitely appalling. What hath God wrought?

  On the other hand, why should not a woman, who is after all a creature like any other, be lustful? Yet to me, the sight of a lustful woman was as incredible as a fire-breathing dragon turning up at the Rotary Club.

  What I really mean of course was that what horrified me was the discovery of the possibility that she might lust for someone not me.

  But of course I had to make sure of it. Love and lust should not be a matter of speculation.

  Margot, it turned out, was indeed sick the morning after Elgin’s stakeout. Pale and feverish.

  Then perhaps she had simply got sick and been cared for by Merlin and Jacoby. Why is it so hard to make certain of a simple thing?

  Margot was sick! Hurray.

  Yes, but I was not Siobhan’s father and Merlin could be and Merlin was here.

  My God, why was I torturing myself?

  “When did it come on, Margot?” I asked her, going to her room after breakfast.

  “God, I damned near fainted during the rushes. I think I did faint later. Out cold. I just barely managed to drag myself home.”

  Can one ever be sure of anything? Did my mother go for innocent joyrides with Uncle Harry, take the air, and see the sights as they said, or did they take the lap robe and head for the woods or a tourist cabin, one of those little pre-motel miniature houses set up on four cinderblocks with a bed, linoleum, gas heater, and tin shower, the essentials.

  What does that sorrowful look of yours mean? And what if they did, would it be so bad, is that what you mean? What are you mourning? Them? Me? Us?

  You know the main difference between you and me? With you everything seems to get dissolved in a kind of sorrowful solution. Poor weak mankind! The trouble is that in your old tolerant Catholic world-weariness, you lose all distinctions. Love everything. Yes, but at midnight all cats are black, so what difference does anything make? It does make a difference? What? You opened your mouth and then thought better of it—

  But don’t you see. I had to find out. There I was in early middle age and I couldn’t answer the most fundamental question of all. What question? This: Are people as nice as they make out and in fact appear to be, or is it all buggery once the door is closed?

  So I meant to find out once and for all. There is something worse than knowing the worst. It is not knowing.

  In the back of my mind all along was the sensation I had when I opened my father’s sock drawer and found the ten thousand dollars under the argyles my mother, nice lady that she was, had knitted for him, honorable man that he was.

  One has to know. There are worse things than bad news.

  6

  IT WAS LUNCHTIME when my daughter Lucy came down for breakfast in quilted housecoat, face voluptuous, sleepy-eyed, slightly puffy.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” I asked her, remembering it was Tuesday.

  “I’m not going back to school.” Her pale heavy face slanted sullenly over her food, eyes blinking regularly. Was she crying?

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve got a job.”

  “Where?”

  “With Raine.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I’m going to be her social and recording secretary.”

  “Jesus, what’s that?”

  “Daddy, they are the most wonderful people in the world.”

  “They?”

  “She and Troy. They are the only people I’ve ever known who are completely free.”

  “Free?”

  “Free to make their own lives.” Lucy looked up at last.

  How little we know our own children! I think I had not looked at her in years. How did I size her up, this little stranger? She was not like her mother. The years would not treat her well. At sixteen she was at her prime; later her face would get heavy in the morning. She was like a child whom voluptuousness had overtaken unawares. By the time she becomes fully aware of it, she will have run to fat. Her own chemistry had played a trick on her and her face was heavy with it. This innocent voluptuousness was the sort—and here I shocked myself—to inspire lewdness in strangers.

  “We sat up all night in the motel room talking.”

  Then perhaps life was as innocent as that: they sat up all night talking. Margot sick and Lucy talking. Why not?

  “About what?”

  “Everything. Raine, you know, is deep into I.P.D. Did you know she was president of the national association?”

  “No.”

  “My job will
really be to be recording secretary for I.P.D.”

  “What will you learn from that?”

  “I’ve learned more in the last three weeks than I ever learned in my life.”

  “What?”

  “About myself. What makes me tick. For example, about the lower centers.”

  “The what?”

  “The four lower centers. As opposed to the three higher, consciousness, mind, spirit.”

  “You mean you want to go back to California with Raine?”

  “I’m going to live with Troy and Raine.”

  “I didn’t know they were married.”

  “They’re not. And I’m glad they’re not. If they were married, I’d be like a daughter or something. This way we’re equals, a threesome, one for all, all for one.”

  Is all niceness then or is all buggery? How can a man be forty-five years old and still not know whether all is niceness or buggery? How does one know for sure?

  “Have you spoken to your mother? You’ll have to have our permission, you know.”

  “She’s all for it. At least she said so this morning. I hope she’s not out of her mind—she said she had a 103-degree fever.”

  Then she was sick and all is niceness and not buggery.

  “You mean you want to live with Troy and Raine?”

  “Yes. Do you want to see their house, rather Raine’s house? Isn’t that neat?”

  From her pocket she took out photos of Raine and of the house, the first inscribed with writing: I could only read To my little—Little what? I couldn’t make it out. The other showed an English beam-in-plaster mansion and some California plants trimmed to shapes, spheres and rhomboids. It looked like the sort of place where Philip Marlowe called on a rich client and insulted the butler.

  “Look at what Raine gave me.”

  Opening her housecoat, she showed me a heavy gold cross nestled in the dusky cleft of her young breasts.

  “She’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever known.”

  She seemed to be. Everyone seemed wonderful. All the town folk thought the movie people wonderful. And in fact they seemed to be.