Lancelot

by Walker Percy

  “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.

  So you fucked it up good and we’re going to have to pull it out for you. We? Who are we? You will find out soon enough. It is enough for you to know how it is going to be, for we are the new Reformation, which is to say we are going to tell you something and show you something you should have known all along.

  We are going to set it out for you, what is good and what is bad, and no Jew-Christian waffling bullshit about it. What we are is the last of the West. What we are is the best of you, Percival, and the best of me, Lancelot, and of Lee and Richard and Saladin and Leonidas and Hector and Agamemnon and Richthofen and Charlemagne and Clovis and Martel. Like them we might even accept your Christ but this time you will not emasculate him or us. We’ll take the Grail you didn’t find but we’ll keep the broadsword and the great warrior Archangel of Mont-Saint-Michel and our Christ will be the stern Christ of the Sistine. And as for your sweet Jesus and your guitar-banging and ass-wiggling nuns, and your love feasts and peace kisses: there is no peace.

  If I were a Jew, I’d know what to do. It’s easy. I’d be in Israel with the sabras. They’re my kind. The only difference between them and the Crusaders is that the Crusaders lost. Ha, isn’t that a switch, come to think of it—that the only Crusaders left in the entire Western world are the Israelis, the very Jews who huddled and shrank and grinned and nodded for two thousand years? The Jews are lucky. They know who they are and they have Israel. We have to make our own Israel, but we know who we are.

  We know who we are and where we stand. There will be leaders and there will be followers. There are now, only neither knows which is which. There will be men who are strong and pure of heart, not for Christ’s sake but for their own sake. There will be virtuous women who are proud of their virtue and there will be women of the street who are there to be fucked and everyone will know which is which. You can’t tell a whore from a lady now, but you will then. You will do right, not because of Jew-Christian commandments but because we say it is right. There will be honorable men and there will be thieves, just as now, but the difference is one will know which is which and there will be no confusion, no nice thieves, no honorable Mafia. There are not many of us but since we are ready to die and no one else is, we shall prevail.

  Women? What about women? You heard me. A man, a youth, a boy will know which women are to be fucked and which to be honored and one will know who to fuck and who to honor.

  Freedom? The New Woman will have perfect freedom. She will be free to be a lady or a whore.

  Don’t women have any say in this? Of course. And we will value them exactly as much as they value themselves. They won’t like it much, you say? The hell with them. They won’t have anything to say about it. Not only are they not strong enough. They don’t care enough. Guinevere didn’t think twice about adultery. It was Lancelot, poor bastard, who went off and brooded in the woods.

  No more fuck-up about who fucks and who gets fucked. The best of women will be what we used to call ladies, like your Virgin. Our Lady. The men? The best of them will be strong and brave and pure of heart, not for Christ’s sake, but like an Apache youth or a Lacedemonian who denies himself to be strong. The others can whoremonger and screw whom they choose. But we will prevail.

  No, it is not you who are offering me something, salvation, a choice, whatever. I am offering you a choice. Do you want to become one of us? You can without giving up a single thing you believe in except milksoppery. I repeat, it was your Lord who said he came to bring not peace but a sword. We may even save your church for you.

  You are pale as a ghost. What did you whisper? Love? That I am full of hatred, anger? Don’t talk to me of love until we shovel out the shit.

  What? What happened then? Don’t look so fearful. Nothing. I saw a dirty movie, that’s all.

  Friday afternoon at the movies. That’s what I should call my own little film or videotape, which Elgin, my cinematographer, made of our little film company resting from their labors.

  It was all very simple. Elgin came to my pigeonnier after lunch, entered as briskly as a vacuum-cleaner salesman, too briskly, with a large valise-like box and a case of reels and, without looking at me, set his suitcase on my desk, opened it, plugged it in, clipped two wires to the back of my TV, showed me how to put the reels in, and, without once having raised his eyes, made as if to leave.

  “Elgin. Wait.”

  He stood in the doorway, freeze-framed, waiting for me to push a button and set him going.

  “Elgin, the film company is pulling out tomorrow. So you might be able to pull your equipment out today. I’ll let you know after I’ve seen these.”

  “I done already pulled it out,” said Elgin not briskly at all but sullenly, as if I had violated some unspoken agreement. What agreement?

  “Then you—”

  “You won’t need to do any more taping.”

  I looked at him.

  “I see. That’ll be all. Go put your tour-guide coat on.”

  He looked at me strangely, at first I thought sullenly, then I saw he was ashamed. I felt a sudden anger. Later, to my astonishment, it came over me why I was angry. Again a confession which does me little credit but it is important I tell you the truth. I had to admit I was angry because he had looked. Looked at the videotape. Then it was I discovered in myself what I had so often despised in others. For I had expected Elgin to do what I told him, to be a technological eavesdropper and spy for me but not listen or look. More than that: I had expected that somehow he could not look—just as the hicks I despised believed that through some magical or at least providential dispensation the Negro bellboy cannot see the naked white woman in the same hotel room. Cannot even if he wanted to: she is somehow invisible.

  There is nothing like a liberal gone sour.

  But I was wrong. He was ashamed, not of what he had seen, but of what he took to be his failure. A technical failure. I should have known.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, hanging his head.

  “I am too.” I still thought he meant he was sorry he had looked.

  “It’s a negative effect I can’t explain.”

  “Negative effect?”

  “Did you ever hold a magnet against a TV screen?”

  “No.”

  “It pulls the images out of shape—the images being nothing but electrons, of course.”

  “Yes, electrons.”

  “I only watched enough to see that the effect is a little weird—But I think you may still have what you want.”

  “Thank you.” Ha. Then he was my nigger after all, and if he could look, wouldn’t, didn’t. Or better, he looked for technical reasons but forbore to see. He was the perfect nigger.

  He closed the door softly but presently opened it again. Again it was a Buell who still had the power to set things
straight.

  Elgin still didn’t look at me. All he said, face courteously inclined in the cracked door, as courteous as a Montgomery bellboy, you see, I’m not looking—was: “Mr. Lance, let me know if there is anything you need.”

  “Okay.”

  Note the exquisite courtesy of “anything you need.” He didn’t say: Let me know if you need any help, I’ll help you. He could have been understood as offering to bring a glass of water, a bourbon. It was for me to fathom the rest.

  He looked now. He looked at me as sorrowfully as you—to hell with him.

  One night at supper during a lull in the conversation Lucy, my daughter, who had said little or nothing and, feeling the accumulating necessity of saying something suitable, saw her chance and piped up, frowning and ducking her dark-brown head and saying it seriously: “It just occurred to me last night: here I am an adult human being, a person, and I have never seen my own cervix.”

  There was a silence. I found myself worrying more about her worrying about her halting conversational entry than about her not seeing her cervix. But Raine and Dana nodded thoughtfully and even, I could see, with a certain courtesy and kindliness as if to encourage her timid foray into their lively talk. Raine put her arm around Lucy, gave her a hug, and said to me:

  “Think of it! A mature woman who has never seen her own cervix!”

  I thought about it.

  Merlin, who did not like Raine, said not to Lucy but to Raine: “So what? I’ve never seen my own asshole. What’s the big deal?”

  But it was Lucy who blushed and ducked her head even lower.

  8

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON AT THE MOVIES: A DOUBLE FEATURE

  WHAT I MAINLY REMEMBER of the tapes is not the tapes themselves but the day outside. The videotapes, which came out as a movie on my tiny Trinitron and which I watched as gravely as I used to watch afternoon reruns of Gunsmoke, I think of now as a tiny theater set down in a great skyey afternoon loud with the rattle of blackbirds. The thunderstorm was gone, the hurricane was still a great Catherine wheel spinning slowly in the Gulf casting its pall of wind and rain two hundred miles ahead to the northeast while its northwestern quadrant sucked in the northern fall, the deep clear Canadian air funneling down, cirrus-flecked five miles high. There was no sign of a hurricane except a sense of urgency and a high commotion in the air. Restive blackbirds took alarm, rose in clouds from the marshes, settled, and rose again.