Lancelot

by Walker Percy

  “You didn’t know that I went for you?”

  “What?” I said, cocking my ear away from the storm.

  “You know, like going for somebody.”

  “You did?”

  “You’re so dumb! And with all that going on—” She waved vaguely toward the hall (by no means drunk or even swaying, but mainly flat and unsurprised: for her one thing was more or less like any other, and could be spoken of in her low bell-like voice).

  She put her hands on my belt buckle, grabbed it with her fingers stuck inside, and gave me an odd little jostle.

  “Couldn’t you tell?”

  “Tell what?” I gazed into her gold eyes.

  Her mild gold gaze drifted indifferently from me to Troy to the hurricane.

  “My God, isn’t that something.” Through the shutters I could see a big white socket where a limb had been ripped off one of the oaks. “Does it turn you on?”

  “To what?”

  “Me,” she said like a drowsy little temple bell. She put her arms around my waist, locked her hands, and squeezed me with surprising strength. “You’re a big mother.”

  I pulled her up to me. She was like a child, but broader, a broad child.

  “Let’s lie down,” she said, tugging fretfully at my buckle. “I’m sleepy.”

  “Go on,” I said absently. I remembered something I had to do. “I remember something I have to do.”

  “What are you doing?” she asked from the bed.

  “I don’t like this light,” I said, picking up the Ray-O-Vac, which was shooting out weak white rays. The kerosene lamp was on the floor.

  “Oh, a coal oil lamp!” Lying in bed, she clapped her hands slowly and without noise. “But hurry up.”

  Before lighting it, I checked the air-conditioning register. It was set high in the wall. My hand could reach it but I couldn’t feel the gas. The cheek is more sensitive. I sat in the corner opposite the register and removed the glass chimney of the lamp and took out a match. I gazed up into the dimness of the fourteen-foot ceiling. Cold air falls. Methane rises. I struck the match. Nothing happened. I lit the wick and replaced the glass chimney and switched off the Ray-O-Vac. The soft yellow light opened like a flower and filled the room.

  Raine’s lips formed a word. She beckoned to me.

  Time passed but it was hard to tell how slow or fast. I was standing by the bed looking down at her. She beckoned and said something. I dropped to one knee beside the bed to hear her. The pillow mashed her lips sideways like a child’s.

  Something occurred to me. Do you think it could be true that in our heart of hearts we always know what is going to happen to us? Not only does a person dying in a hospital know perfectly well he is going to die even though he may not know what he knows. Not only that but even a passenger on an airplane that is about to blow up somehow knows in a part of his being what is going to happen.

  Anyhow she knew. That is, she knew something.

  She was talking about her childhood. The kerosene lamp reminded her of growing up in West Virginia. Her father was a drunk ex-coal miner with black lung. Her mother took to staying out late at night with men, leaving her with the other children. She was fourteen. She thought her mother was taking money from the men. Her mother was. She hated her mother. But her mother was doing it to buy Raine her first party dress, a “basic black” with “classic opera pumps.”

  “Here’s the funny thing,” said Raine through her famous but now mashed lips, not caring how she looked, gazing at the flame in the chimney which I could see upside down in her pupil. “You would have thought I’d be grateful. Let me tell you something. Gratitude is shit. You know what I was? Happy. That’s all. And that’s better. I was happy to have the dress. I didn’t care how she got it. But that was what she wanted: to see me happy. So all was well after all, wasn’t it? I was happy and she was happy to see me happy.”

  Time seemed to pass both slowly and jerkily. Or maybe that’s the way I remember it.

  “Come here,” said Raine.

  I was standing over her. She was lying prone, bare legs apart. One hand was stretched awkwardly behind her, fumbling for me. She touched me.

  I remember thinking: Why is the real so different from fantasy? Do you remember our locker-room fantasies? How would you like to have Ava Gardner here and now on this rainy day, in this gym, the gym cleared out, nobody but you and Ava on the janitor’s cot in the boiler room, and so forth. But a hurricane is even better, and there was Raine Robinette herself, groping for me, her famous lips mashed against the pillow, her famous thighs under me. And alone with her, or as good as alone, maybe even better: Troy there but out of it, curled up on the very edge of Lucy’s queen-size rosewood tester.

  And I? I was sitting gazing down at her, my thumbnail against my teeth, thinking of the queerness of the present here-and-now moment. Other times belong to someone or something or oneself and smell of someone or something or oneself. The present is something else. To live in the past and future is easy. To live in the present is like threading a needle. It came to me: our great locker-room lust had no relation to the present. Lust is a function of the future.

  Now her hand, knowledgeable even though stretched awkwardly behind her and upside down, was touching me. I was watching her, thumbnail against tooth, gazing at nothing in particular.

  No, not at nothing. At something. Something winked on a finger of the groping hand. It was the blue sapphire in Lucy’s ring. Raine was wearing my daughter Lucy’s Tri-Phi sorority ring. It was loose on Raine’s middle finger. Raine wore it the way a girl wears a boy’s ring. Lucy had a big callow teen girl’s hand.

  As I was gazing at the ring on the groping hand, I began to smile. My eyes focused and seemed to wink back at the ring. A little arrow of interest shot up my spine. I smiled and guided Raine’s hand to me. You know why I smiled, don’t you? No? Because I discovered the secret of love. It is hate. Or rather the possibility of hate. The possibility of hate rescued lust from the locker-room future and restored it to the present.

  “Here now,” I said smiling, and tenderly pulling her body up, reaching around the front of her until my hands felt the soft crests of her pelvis.

  “What?” she asked. “Oh.”

  At first as her face was pressed into the pillow her lips were mashed down even more. I was alone, far above her, upright and smiling in the darkness.

  Later she wanted to turn over. “Ah,” she said. We watched each other, her face turned and looking back, her eyes aslit and gleaming in the soft light. We were alone and watchful, that is, each of us was alone and watchful of the other. No longer children were we but adults and watchful, which comes of being adults. What had God in store for us? So it was this. For what comes of being adult was this probing her for her secret, the secret which I had to find out and she wanted me to find out. The Jews called it knowing and now I knew why. Every time I went deeper I knew her better. Soon I would know her secret. We were watching each other. We were going to know each other but one of us would know first and therefore win. The watching was a contest. I was coming close, closer. We watched each other watching. It was a contest. She lost. When I found it out, the secret, she closed her eyes and curled around me like a burning leaf.

  I left her asleep next to Troy, the two nested like spoons.

  The rest of it? What? Oh. Yes. Well, I’ll be brief. Do you mind if I summarize? There is no pleasure in dwelling on it. Anyway it happened almost as an afterthought. The whole business took no more than fifteen minutes.

  I didn’t see what I wanted to see after all. What did I want to see? the money in my father’s sock drawer? Why was it so important for me to see them, Margot and Jacoby? What new sweet-horrid revelation did I expect to gain from witnessing what I already knew? Was it a kind of voyeurism? Or was it a desire to feel the lance strike home to the heart of the abscess and let the puss out? I still didn’t know. I knew only that it was necessary to know, to know only as the eyes know. The eyes have to know.

&n
bsp; But I did not see them after all. I felt them.

  I entered Margot’s bedroom, mine and Margot’s, that is. Somehow there seemed no great need for precautions now. Perhaps it was because the storm was at its height. There was a steady shrieking as if the hurricane were blowing through steel rigging. It was pitch dark. So I could not hear them or see them! Who was shrieking? they? the hurricane? both? Belle Isle groaned and labored. The great timbers sang and popped overhead. The lightning was less frequent now but brighter. I waited and counted during the intervals. The flashes came about eight or ten seconds apart.

  The shrieking was so loud it seemed to make things invisible.

  Now in the short foyer of the master bedroom I knelt and lit the second lamp, this time leaving the chimney off. I began to worry about leaving the chimney on the lamp in Raine’s room. I turned the wick low.

  Standing straight against the wall of the foyer, I calculated I could see the reflection of the foot of the bed in the mirror of the huge crotch mahogany armoire which stood against the inside wall of the bedroom. I waited, perfectly still, back, head, palms of hands touching the cool plaster.

  When the lightning flashed, striping the room through the shutters, I could see two bedposts striped like barber poles in the mirror even though the mirror was fogged by age, its silvering moth-eaten.

  It was the great Calhoun bed, built by my ancestor for his friend John C. Calhoun to sleep in in the White House in 1844. But Calhoun never slept in the White House so Royal Moultrie Lamar kept the bed. It was like a cathedral, a Gothic bed, posts as thick as trees, carved and fluted and tapering to spires and gargoyles above the canopy. The headboard was as massive and complex as an altar screen. Panels of openwork braced posts and rails like flying buttresses.

  Between flashes I walked without hurrying to the cul-de-sac between the armoire and the far wall. From here one looked directly at the top half of the bed. The shrieking grew worse but the lightning was a long time coming. It came, a short bright burst like a camera flashbulb. Something moved. But my view was obstructed by the triangular bracing between the post and the side rail.

  Something white gleamed on the Aubusson rug at my feet. I picked it up. A handkerchief? No, a pair of jockey shorts. I gazed at it dreamily. There was something archaic about it, an ancient artifact it was. It was like finding a toilet article, a broken clay comb in one of the houses at Pompeii. I dropped it behind me and waited.

  Presently the lightning stopped but the noise was so loud, a bass roaring and soprano shrieking, that it was palpable, a thickening and curdling of the darkness. It became natural to open one’s mouth to let the sound circulate, shriek into one’s ears and out the mouth. I felt invisible.

  Then, though I don’t remember how I got there, I was standing by the bed looking down. There was nothing to see. Kneeling I put my ear to the openwork panel of the flying buttress, an unconsecrated priest hearing an impenitent confession. But presently, in a lull there was a voice. I could not make out the words but the voice rose and fell in a prayer-like intonation.

  God. Sh— God. Sh—

  In my confessional I fell to musing. Why does love require the absolute polarities of divinity-obscenity? I was right about love: it is an absolute and therefore beyond all categories. Who else but God arranged that love should pitch its tent in the place of excrement? Why not then curse and call on God in an act of love?

  My eyes began to make things out. No darkness is absolute. The candle glow from the foyer made the faintest glimmer on the white walls. It was possible to make out the looming shape of the bed. I was standing. There was a shape on the bed. Its skin was darker than the white sheets. Now I could see it, the strangest of all beasts, two-backed and pied, light-skinned dark-skinned, striving against itself, holding discourse with itself in prayers and curses.

  Ah men, was this God’s secret plan for us? (What did your Jewish Bible say about all men being conceived in sin?) A musing wonder filled me. I ran my thumbnail along my teeth.

  My head ached, yet I felt very well, strong and light, though a bit giddy. My body seemed to float. Then I realized that the methane had come down. It had filled the high dim vault of the room and had come down close enough to breathe. At first I could not understand why my heart was beating fast and my breath labored, because I felt good. Then I understood. It was the methane. Standing, I was above them. It. I considered: it would be better to get lower and closer. It was dark.

  Though I must have been leaning, I seemed to be floating over them. Jacoby’s back was a darkness within the dark. Musingly I touched it, the beast.

  “Oh, yes,” it said.

  A white thigh and knee angled out. I considered her, its, foot, the toes splayed and curled up—isn’t that called a Babinski sign, Doctor, Father, whatever you are? You know, I’d seen that before, the way her toes curled out and up. and had secretly thought of it as a sign of her common Irish or country-Texas origins or both. It seemed vulgar. I could remember my mother saying a lady always points her toes when she dances. Now my hand was exploring the white thigh, searched for and found what it already knew so well, the strap of fiber along the outside which bound the deep flesh above and below it. My fingers traced the fiber toward the knee, where it had a ribbed-silk texture.

  “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, h
e 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.”