THOUGH THE SETTING OF THIS novel appears to be New Orleans and the River Road, this city and this famous road are used here as place names of an imaginary terrain. The River Road does not really run into “Feliciana Parish.” In fact there is no Feliciana Parish now. There is no “English Coast” that I know of. There is an English Turn, but it is downriver not upriver from New Orleans. Felicity Street does cross Annunciation Street in New Orleans, but not near Lafayette Cemetery. Lafayette Cemetery does exist, but there is no jail or hospital or levee next to it. Murders and house burnings have occurred on River Road, but none, as far as I know, like those herein depicted. There never was a house named Belle Isle. There was a house named Northumberland in Spanish West Florida but it no longer stands. Nor do the characters bear any intentional relation to real persons living or dead.

COME INTO MY CELL. Make yourself at home. Take the chair; I’ll sit on the cot. No? You prefer to stand by the window? I understand. You like my little view. Have you noticed that the narrower the view the more you can see? For the first time I understand how old ladies can sit on their porches for years.

Don’t I know you? You look very familiar. I’ve been feeling rather depressed and I don’t remember things very well. I think I am here because of that or because I committed a crime. Perhaps both. Is this a prison or a hospital or a prison hospital? A Center for Aberrant Behavior? So that’s it. I have behaved aberrantly. In short, I’m in the nuthouse.

I feel certain that I know you and know you well. It’s not that I’m crazy and can’t remember things but rather that the past doesn’t seem worth remembering. It takes such an effort. Everything takes a tremendous effort and it’s hardly worth the trouble — everything except staying in my little cell and looking at my little view.

A cell like this, whether prison or not, is not a bad place to spend a year, believe it or not. I think I have been here a year. Perhaps two. Perhaps six months. I am not sure. A clean cell, a high ceiling, a cot, a chair, and a desk. It’s not too cold or hot or damp and the food’s edible. A remarkable prison! Or a remarkable hospital as the case may be. And a view, even if the view is nothing more than a patch of sky, a corner of Lafayette Cemetery, a slice of levee, and a short stretch of Annunciation Street.

Isn’t that all you can see? No, look again. There’s a great deal more. I know that narrow world by heart and I can tell you from here a few things you may not have noticed. For example, if you lean into the embrasure and crane to the left as far as possible, you can see part of a sign around the corner. By the utmost effort and if you press your temple against the bricks, you can make out the following letters:

Free &

COME IN, COME IN. Sit down. You still won’t? I have a confession to make. I was not quite honest yesterday when I pretended not to know you. I knew you perfectly well. There’s nothing wrong with my memory. It’s just that I don’t like to remember. Why shouldn’t I remember you? We were best of friends, in fact inseparable if you recall. It’s just that it was quite a shock seeing you after all these years. No; not even that is true. I noticed you in the cemetery day before yesterday. Still I hardly knew what to say to you. What do you say to someone after twenty years when you have already said everything.

It bothers you a bit too, doesn’t it? You are shy with me. But you like my window and my little view, I can see.

You still look doubtful. About my sanity? Well yes, after all, here I am in the nuthouse. But I remember you perfectly, everything we ever did, every name you ever had. We knew each other by several names depending on the oblique and obscure circumstances of our lives — and our readings. I bet I remember your names better than you. To begin with, you were simply Harry, when you lived at Northumberland close to us on the River Road and we went to school together. Later you were known variously as Harry Hotspur, a misnomer because though you were pugnacious you were not much of a fighter. Also as Prince Hal, because you seemed happy only in whorehouses. Also as Northumberland, after the house you lived in. Also as Percival and Parsifal, who found the Grail and brought life to a dead land. Also by several cheerful obscene nicknames in the D.K.E. fraternity of which the least objectionable was Pussy. Miss Margaret Mae McDowell of Sweet Briar, I want you to meet my friend and roommate, Pussy. Later, I understand you took a religious name when you became a priest: John, a good name. But is it John the Evangelist who loved so much or John the Baptist, a loner out in the wilderness? You were a loner.

So as you see, I remember a great deal about you. Right?

Ah, you smile your old smile.

Yet you prefer to look at the cemetery.

It makes a pretty scene today, don’t you think? All Souls’ Day. A pleasant feast for the dead: the women in the cemetery whitewashing the tombs, trimming the tiny lawns, setting out chrysanthemums, real and plastic, lighting candles, scrubbing the marble lintels. They remind me of Baltimore housewives on their hands and knees washing the white doorsteps of row houses.

A pretty sight, the bustling cluttered cemetery, the copper-penny-colored rain trees, the first fitful north wind blowing leaves every which way. If you listen carefully, you can hear the dry curlicues of crepe-myrtle leaves blowing up and down the paths like popcorn. When the wind shifts you catch a whiff of coffee and tar from the Tchoupitoulas docks.

In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are.

Well, I found out who you are. Your profession, that is. A priest-physician. Which is to say, a screwed-up priest or a half-assed physician. Or both. Ah, I managed to surprise you, didn’t I? Yes, someone told me yesterday. But it is more than that. It was something I observed.

You were taking a shortcut through the cemetery. One of the women scrubbing the tombs stopped you to ask you something. Obviously she recognized you. You shook your head and moved on. But what could she have asked you? Only one thing under the circumstances. To say a prayer for the dead. An old custom here, particularly on All Souls’ Day. You turned her down.

So something went wrong with you too. Or you wouldn’t be here serving as assistant chaplain or substitute psychiatrist or whatever it is you’re doing. A non-job. Are you in trouble? Is it a woman? Are you in love?

Do you remember “falling in love,” “being in love”?

There was a time when I thought that was the only thing that really mattered. No, there were two things and two times in my life.

At first I thought “being in love” was the only thing. Holding a sweet Georgia girl in your arms and dancing to the “Limelight” theme in the Carolina mountains in the summer of ’52, out of doors, with the lightning bugs and the Japanese lanterns.

Later I became coarser or perhaps more realistic. I began to wonder if there was such a thing as “being in love,” or whether the best things in life might not be such simple, age-old pleasures as ordinary sexual intercourse and ordinary drinking. Indeed, what could be finer than to be a grown healthy man and to meet a fine-looking woman you’ve never seen before and to want her on the spot and to see also that she likes you, to invite her to have a few drinks in a bar, to put your hand under her dress, to touch the deep white flesh of her thigh, to speak into her ear, “Well, now, sweetheart, what do you say?” Right? No?

But that’s falling in love too, in a way, isn’t it? Yet very different. I wonder which is better. To tell you the truth. I haven’t quite sorted it out yet.

But certainly “love” is one or the other, no doubt the latter. Sometimes I think we were the victims of a gigantic hoax by our elders, that there was an elaborate conspiracy to conceal from us the one simple fact that the only important, certainly the best thing in life, is ordinary sexual love.

I “fell in love” with Lucy Cobb from Georgia and married her. Then she died. Then I “fell in love” with Margot and married her. She died too.

Would it surprise you if I told you that I might be falling in love again? With the girl in the next room. I’ve never seen her. But they tell me she was gang-raped by some sailors in the Quarter, forced to commit unnatural acts many times, then beaten up and thrown onto the batture. She won’t speak to anybody. And she has to be force fed. Like me she prefers the solitude of her cell. But we communicate by tapping on the wall. It is strange. Her defilement restores her to a kind of innocence.

Communication is simple when you are “in love.” Driving with Lucy Cobb through the Carolina summer night with the top down and the radio playing the “Limelight” theme, one could say to her simply:

“I like that, don’t you?”

And she could say: “Yes.”

With the girl in the next room it is the same. Yesterday I tapped twice.

She tapped back twice.

It might have been an accident. On the other hand, it could have been a true communication. My heart beat as if I were falling in love for the first time.

Then you know my story? I know it too of course, but I’m not sure how much I really remember. I think of it in terms of headlines: BELLE ISLE BURNS, BODIES OF FILM STARS CHARRED BEYOND RECOGNITION. SCION OF OLD FAMILY CRAZED BY GRIEF AND RAGE. SUFFERS BURNS TRYING TO SAVE WIFE. No doubt I read such headlines. I wonder why the headlines are easier to remember than the event itself.

Now I’ve begun to remember some things perfectly. It was seeing you that did it.

The first thing I remembered was the exact circumstances under which I discovered that my wife was deceiving me. But what did that have to do with you? Memory is a strange thing.

The next thing I remembered made more sense. I remembered the first time I had seen you since childhood. You were sitting in the fraternity house alone, drinking and reading Verlaine. That made quite an impression on me. I remember wondering whether you were not trying to make an impression. What kind of an act is that, I wondered. (It was a bit of an act, wasn’t it?)

Then this morning I remembered a great deal more. It was not as if I had really forgotten but rather that I didn’t have the — the what? — the inclination to think about the past. I had got out of the trick of doing it. Seeing you was a kind of catalyst, the occasion of my remembering. It is like the first time you look through binoculars: everything is confused, blurred, unfocused, flat; then all of a sudden click: distance drops away and there is everything in the round, bigger than life.

I think I began to remember by remembering our likenesses and our differences: we both lived in old houses on the River Road on the English Coast, I in Belle Isle, you in Northumberland.

Though we would never have admitted it, we regarded ourselves as an enclave of the English gentry set down among hordes of good docile Negroes and comical French peasants. Our families were the original Tory English colonials who accepted Spanish hospitality in Feliciana Parish to get away from the crazy rebellious Americans. But we were united less by a common history than by our dislike of Catholics and the Longs. We were honorable families.

You and I were also classmates, fraternity brothers, and later best of friends. We went to whorehouses. I understand young men don’t have to go to whorehouses any more.

There the resemblances stopped. Your family was rich so you went to prep school in the North. We were poor so I went to public high school. You were thin, withdrawn, and you drank too much, were said to be brilliant and to have the promise of a great future (did you?), yet you were obscure, almost unknown: when you graduated you didn’t know six people in the entire school.

I was the opposite: the type who reaches the peak of his life in college and declines thereafter: prominent on campus, debater, second-string all-S.E.C. halfback, Rhodes scholar, even “smart,” that is, a sort of second-echelon Phi Beta Kappa. Being “smart” on the football team meant that you read Time magazine and had heard of the Marshall Plan. (“You don’t believe he can tell you about the Marshall Plan? Ask him! He’s one more smart sapsucker.”) They, my teammates, admired “smartness” more than anybody I’ve met before or since.

I achieved my single small immortality at the age of twenty-one when I caught an Alabama punt standing on the back line of the end zone and ran it out 110 yards for a touchdown. It is still on the record books as the longest punt return in history. The beauty is, it always will be — it can’t be surpassed. It’s like running the mile in zero minutes.

I was “smart,” but never smart in your complex way of drinking and reading Verlaine (that was an act, wasn’t it?)

You were also belligerent when drunk and since you were built like Pope Pius XII, six feet and about 120 pounds, many was the time I had to save your ass from being whipped. (Yes, I was also Golden Gloves runner-up and though I weighed only 170 could take anybody on the football team, another source of astonishment to those Cajuns: “That son of a bitch beat the shit out of Durel Thibodeaux!” (defensive tackle, 265).

You were melancholy and abstracted and attractive to women but so thin I had to fix you up with big handsome motherly girls who didn’t mind hugging your bones.

There was a difference in our families. The men in my family (until my father) were gregarious, politically active (anti-Long), and violent. The men in your family tended toward depression and early suicide.

Yet look who’s depressed now.

You cock the same sardonic eye at me you cocked when you looked up from Verlaine.

As I say, seeing you allowed me to remember the circumstances under which I discovered that my wife had deceived me, that is, had had carnal relations with another man.

Is it this which was so difficult to remember? It is not that I forgot it but that I found it intolerable to think about. But why should it be intolerable? Is the sexual offense a special category and therefore unlike other offenses, theft, assault, even murder?

Or is it that the sexual belongs to no category at all, is unspeakable? Isn’t sexual pleasure unspeakable? Then why shouldn’t the sexual offense be unspeakable?

No, I didn’t really forget anything. It was rather that seeing you allowed me to think about it. I wonder why. Because we were friends or because you are used to hearing the unspeakable? Or because seeing you reminded me of the pigeonnier?

But let me ask you seriously: Why is it such an unspeakable thing for one creature to obtrude a small portion of its body into the body of another creature? Is it not in fact a trivial matter when one puts it that way? I don’t think women attach too much importance to it.

But suppose I put it another way. Isn’t it unspeakable to me to imagine Margot lying under another man, her head turning to and fro in a way I knew only too well, her lips stretched, a little mew-cry escaping her lips? Isn’t that unspeakable? Yes. But why? When I imagined other things happening to Margot, even the worst things, they were painful but not intolerable: Margot seriously ill, Margot hurt in an accident, Margot stealing money, even Margot dead, murdered. The thought of Margot dead was painful but not intolerable. But Margot under another man …

Hm. Do you think it is only our generation who put so much stock in it, the sexual connection, or as the kids say, got hung up? The ancients didn’t seem to dwell on it too much; even the Bible is rather casual. Your God seemed much more jealous of false idols, golden calves, than his people messing around with each other. Perhaps God’s jealousy is different from ours. I wouldn’t have minded Margot kneeling before a Buddha. Then why should I worry about a small matter like Margot taking a small part of Merlin’s body into her body? As a physician, wouldn’t you say that nothing more is involved than the touch of one membrane against another? Cells touching cells.

Not even your church took it very seriously until recent years. Dante was downright indulgent with sexual sinners. They occupied a rather pleasant anteroom to hell.

And the present generation! Sex doesn’t even seem to rate among the Top Ten experiences. I remember once I visited my son. He got out of bed, where he and his girl friend were lying naked and twined about each other, yawned, threw a sheet over her, then proceeded to tell me what was really on his mind: a guitar. A guitar! A certain kind of guitar. Oh, Christ, if only he could afford that guitar! Maybe I was good for four hundred dollars? As I wrote him a check I remember thinking: Very well, he lusts after, loves that guitar. But once he got it, would he mind somebody else playing it? Perhaps. But he wouldn’t find it unspeakable.

My son got enough of women before he was twenty. Presently he appears to be a mild homosexual. But in either case, hetero or homo, it doesn’t seem to count for a great deal to him.

Is it just our generation which got hung up on it?

You shrug and cock an eye at the cemetery.

Then is it just me?

I remember where I first discovered her adultery. In the room under the pigeonnier. Do you remember that room? You and I used to sit there on weekends or in the summer and drink and read aloud — you mostly — the dirty parts of Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer. That was a discovery for me too: that there were not only bad dirty books and great clean books but also great dirty books (yes! that’s the connection: two discoveries made in the same place). When you and I went there, it was still being used by the pigeons, six inches deep in pigeon shit upstairs, and the cooing-chuckling going very well with Joyce and Miller read aloud. Downstairs was a junk room, an accumulation of the detritus of summer, crumbling hammocks and badminton nets and busted croquet balls, but dry and cool. Do you remember that summer? That was the year they drilled an oil well where the old wing of Belle Isle used to be (it too had burned mysteriously a hundred years earlier), and hit gas. For the first time since the war we had a little money. Do you remember poking around the junk in the pigeonnier and finding what looked like the original Bowie knife? Maybe it was. My ancestor did know Bowie, even had a part in the notorious Vidalia sand-bar duel in which Bowie actually carved a fellow limb from limb. At any rate, my grandfather made a good story of it when I showed him the knife, claimed it was one of the originals made by Bowie’s slave blacksmith (though it wasn’t: the original was made from a rasp and still showed the grooves), and displayed it as part of his spiel to the tourists whom he used to lead around Belle Isle at a dollar a head. He’d tell them Bowie stories and Eleanor Roosevelt stories.

Later Margot, discovering that the pigeonnier was an architectural gem, had it converted into a study for me. To her delight, after scraping off 150 years of pigeon shit they found the original cypress floor of two-by-twelves marvelously preserved, two-foot-thick walls of slave brick — even pigeons lived better than we do now. She found me a plantation desk and chair made by slave artisans and there I sat, feeling like Jeff Davis at Beauvoir. ready to write my memoirs. Except I had no memoirs. There was nothing to remember.

At any rate, it was there at 5:01 in the afternoon that I discovered purely by chance that my wife had been, and probably was still, unfaithful to me.

It is a mystery which I ponder endlessly: that my life is divided into two parts. Before and After, before and after the moment I discovered that my wife had been rendered ecstatic, beside herself, by a man on top of her.

My discovery occurred purely by accident. At exactly 5:01 p.m. the Ethyl whistle had just stopped blowing.

I happened to look down at my desk and saw something. Only on second sight — and I don’t even know why I looked at it again — did it begin to take on a terrific significance.

My reaction was not what you might suppose. I can only compare it, my reaction, to that of a scientist, an astronomer say, who routinely examines photographic plates of sectors of the heavens and sees the usual random scattering of dots of light. He is about to file away one such plate, has already done so, when a tiny little something clicks in his head. Hold on. Hm. Whoa. What’s this? Something is wrong. Let’s have a look. So he takes another look. Yes, sure enough, one dot, not even a bright dot, one of the lesser dots, is a bit out of place. You’ve seen the photos in the newspapers, random star dots and four arrows pointing to a single dot. To make sure, the astronomer compares this plate with the last he took of the same tiny sector of the heavens. Sure enough, the dot is out of place. It has moved. What of it, thinks the layman, one insignificant dot out of a billion dots slightly out of place? The astronomer knows better: the dot is one millisecond out of place, click click goes the computer, and from the most insignificant observation the astronomer calculates with absolute certainty and finality that a comet is on a collision course with the earth and will arrive in two and a half months. In eight weeks the dot will have grown to the size of the sun, the oceans risen forty feet. New York will be under water, skyscrapers toppling, U.N. meeting on Mount Washington, etc.

How can such dire and absolutely verifiable events follow upon the most insignificant of evidence?

In my case, the evidence was not the minute shift of a dot on a photographic plate but a letter on my desk. No, not a love letter; no, I mean a letter in the alphabet. The letter O. I’ll explain, if you’re interested. Christ, you don’t seem to be. Are you watching that girl I hear singing? I hear her every day. You know her, don’t you?

I’ve seen you speak to her on the levee. She’s lovely, isn’t she? Clean jeans, clean combed hair halfway down her back. She crosses the levee every day. I think she lives in one of the shacks on the batture. Probably a transient from the North, like one of the hundreds of goldfinches who blow in every October.

One becomes good at observing people after a year, like an old lady who has nothing better to do than peep through the blinds. I observed that you know her well. Are you in love with her?

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

Freedom’s just another word, Lord, for nothing

YOU WERE ASKING me how I felt when I discovered Margot had been unfaithful to me. Yes, that is very important if you are to understand what happened later.

First, you must understand that the usual emotions which one might consider appropriate — shock, anger, shame — do not apply. True, there is a kind of dread at the discovery but there is also a curious sense of expectancy, a secret sweetness at the core of the dread.

I can only compare it to the time I discovered my father was a crook. It was a long time ago. I was a child. My mother was going shopping and had sent me up to swipe some of his pocket money from his sock drawer. For a couple of years he had had a political appointment with the insurance commission with a “reform” administration. He had been accused of being in charge of parceling out the state’s insurance business and taking kickbacks from local agencies. Of course we knew that could not be true. We were an honorable family. We had nothing to do with the Longs. We may have lost our money, Belle Isle was half in ruins, but we were an honorable family with an honorable name. Much talk of dirty politics. The honor of the family won out and even the opposition gave up. So I opened the sock drawer and found not ten dollars but ten thousand dollars stuck carelessly under some argyle socks.

What I can still remember is the sight of the money and the fact that my eye could not get enough of it. There was a secret savoring of it as if the eye were exploring it with its tongue. When there is something to see, some thing, a new thing, there is no end to the seeing. Have you ever watched onlookers at the scene of violence, an accident, a killing, a dead or dying body in the street? Their eyes shift to and fro ever so slightly, scanning, trying to take it all in. There is no end to the feast.

At the sight of the money, a new world opened up for me. The old world fell to pieces — not necessarily a bad thing. Ah, then, things are not so nice, I said to myself. But you see, that was an important discovery. For if there is one thing harder to bear than dishonor, it is honor, being brought up in a family where everything is so nice, perfect in fact, except of course oneself.

You nod. But no, wait. The discovery about Margot involved something quite different. There was a sense of astonishment, of discovery, of a new world opening up, but the new world was totally unknown. Where does one go from here? I felt like those two scientists — what were their names? — who did the experiment on the speed of light and kept getting the wrong result. It just would not come out right. The wrong result was unthinkable. Because if it were true, all physics went out the window and one had to start from scratch. It took Einstein to comprehend that the wrong answer might be right.

One has first to accept and believe what one knows theoretically. One must see for oneself. Einstein had to be sure about those other two fellows before he took the trouble to take the next logical step.

One has to know for sure before doing anything. I had to be sure about Margot, about what she had done and was doing now. I had to be absolutely certain.

It was getting dark. The movie crew had gone. Margot, Merlin, Jacoby, and Raine would be back for supper. Elgin came with my toddy on a silver tray. Toddy! We never drank toddies or juleps as you recall, just bourbon straight or maybe with water, but with Margot it was toddies and juleps. She came from West Texas, where God knows what they drank, but she figured at Belle Isle and for Merlin it was toddies and juleps. No, even before Merlin.

I sat behind my plantation desk. Elgin sat in the slave chair, made by slaves for slaves. Margot claimed, I guess correctly enough, that the work of some slave artisans had the simplicity and beauty of Shaker furniture.

“Elgin,” I said. I had been thinking. “Did you happen to hear what time they got in last night? The reason I ask is I heard somebody, maybe a prowler, around two.”

Elgin looked at me. “They didn’t come in till after three.”

He knew who “they” were. After supper, Margot, Merlin, and the rest would usually go back to the Holiday Inn to view rushes from the past week’s shooting. It took a week because the film had to be flown to Burbank for developing. You have to use the same chemical bath, you can’t just drop it off at the local Fotomat. I invited, rather Margot invited, Merlin and Jacoby and Raine and Dana to stay at Belle Isle. They made so much noise coming in late with all their laughter and film talk that I took to sleeping in the corner bedroom. Then Margot suggested that I would sleep better in the pigeonnier. She fixed it up and I moved in, finally staying in the pigeonnier altogether. Even when the film folk moved back to the Holiday Inn, I stayed in the pigeonnier. Why? I looked around. What was I doing living in a pigeon roost?

“Elgin, there is something I want you to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

Elgin is, was, the only man, woman, or child I would trust completely outside of you, the more credit to him because it’s required of you, isn’t it? (Christ, what are you looking for down there? the girl?)

“Is the house empty?”

“Yes, sir. Mama’s done gone home and there were some late tourists. But they’ve gone. At five-thirty I had to ax them to leave.”

Elgin, age twenty-two, is a well-set-up youth, slim, café-au-lait, and smart — he went to St. Augustine, the elite Black Catholic school in New Orleans, knew more about chemistry than you and I learned in college. Then got a scholarship to M.I.T. He is well-spoken but to save his life he can’t say ask any more than a Japanese can say an r or a German thank you. If he becomes U.S. Senator or wins the Nobel Prize, which he is more apt to do than you or I. he’ll sure as hell say ax in his acceptance speech.

“Elgin, there’s something I want you to do for me.”

“Yes, sir.” He looked at me. It was then that I realized that for a long time I hadn’t asked him or anybody to do anything, because I hadn’t anything to do.

“You know the ‘hiding hole’ next to the chimney?”

“Yes, sir.” He relaxed: it is something to do with the house, he thinks, and the tourists.

The hiding hole was part of Elgin’s spiel to the tourists. That summer Elgin and his sister Doreen took turns leading the tourists through the house. They tell them the usual stuff — that though Belle Isle is indeed a small island now, surrounded by Ethyl pipery, in 1859 it had 3,500 arpents of land, harvested 2,000 hogsheads of sugar, had its own race track and fifty racing horses in the stable.

— that — and this is the sort of thing Peoria housewives oh and ah at: the marble mantelpiece was delivered from Carrara accompanied by two marble cutters, a right-handed one and a left-handed one, so they could carve the fresh-cut marble at the same time before the marble “hardened” (something marble does).

— that the solid silver hardware of the doors, locks, hinges, keyholes, taken for steel by the Yankee soldiers, no, not even taken, the metal not even considered, for what Yankee or for that matter who else in the world but Louis XIV would think of a sterling-silver door hinge?

— that all the rest, brick, column flutings, wavy window glass, woodwork, even iron cookery was made by slave artisans on the place.

— that finally, the most important to my plan, the hiding hole, no more than a warming oven let into the brick next to the fireplace but actually used as a hiding hole one day when nineteen-year-old Private Clayton Laughlin Lamar home on leave in 1862 hid from a Yankee patrol. This compartment, at any rate, was discovered to run the length of the chimney on both sides for three stories and so was fitted out later by an enterprising Lamar as a dumbwaiter to raise warm food to ailing Aunt Clarisse confined twenty years to a second-story bedroom for complaints real and imaginary, the same bedroom shared until recently by Margot and me and slept in now by her alone. Or did she sleep alone?

Elgin’s father, Ellis Buell, and I used to play in the dumbwaiter, letting each other up and down from living room to bedroom to attic. If there is something about a concealed hole in the wall which fascinates Ohio tourists, there is something about traveling in it from one room to another by a magic and unprovided route which astounds children. Children believe that a wall is a wall, that the word says what is and what is not, and that if there is something else there the word doesn’t say, reality itself is tricked and a new magic and unnamed world opens.

“Does that dumbwaiter still work?”

“That old rope rotten.” Elgin was excited. Not excited. Mystified. What am I up to? What he gon do next? He doesn’t know, but he’ll go along.

Late supper as usual. Margot, Merlin, Dana, Raine, and my daughter Lucy. Tex Reilly, Margot’s father, and Siobhan up on the third floor watching Mannix. A happy arrangement for all concerned because it got Tex and Siobhan out of the way without banishing them. Tex made his money by inventing a new kind of drilling “mud” but Margot thought he wouldn’t fit in with this company. She was ashamed of him. The other night they were blasting Hollywood as usual and the grossness of Hollywood types like Chill Wills. Fair enough. Chill may indeed be gross. The trouble is, Tex looks and talks a lot like Chill Wills.

It was after nine. Nothing was changed, except me. My “discovery” changed everything. I’ve become watchful, like a man who hears a footstep behind him. And sober. For some reason or other, since my “discovery” at 5:01 p.m., more than four hours ago, it had not been necessary to drink.

Merlin as usual went out of his way to be nice to me. He liked me and I him. His charm was genuine. He deferred to me as his local expert on the Southern upper class and asked good questions: “Was there much socializing between the English plantation society on this side of the river and the French-Catholic on the other?” (Yes, there was. They’d row back and forth across the river and dance all night.) His ear was sharp: “I notice people here, not necessarily the lower classes, saying something like: ‘Why you do me that?’ instead of ‘Why do you do that to me?’ Is that Black, French, or Anglo-Saxon?” (I didn’t know.)

His blue gaze engaged me with a lively intimacy, establishing a bond between us and excluding the others. Somehow his offense against me was also an occasion of intimacy between us. I felt it too. Things were understood and unspoken between us. It went without saying for example that actors are dumbbells. Not even Margot followed us when he spoke of Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” and Hemingway’s nastiness to Fitzgerald.

It was as if we were old hands at something or other. But at what? Why should there be a bond between us? But he listened with total attentiveness, leaning across to me over his folded brown arms. He was lean and fit and old, muscular, thick-chested, heavy shock of yellowed gray hair curling over one eye. He had emphysema, I think: his neck ligaments held his chest up like a barrel. No sign of considerable age except the white hairs sprouting over the zipper of his jump suit and the white fiber around his blue iris.

Margot had a triumphant night, I remember. They were worried about the “second unit” falling behind schedule. The second unit was supposed to shoot a scene, the opening scene of the film in fact, a flashback where the young son comes home from Heidelberg, steps off the steamboat at the plantation landing. They had rented a steamboat (a New Orleans excursion boat), found a landing in Grand Gulf, but the current was wrong and the boat could not warp into a landing. Days had been wasted, thousands spent.

“The board is four days out,” said Margot severely. The “board” was actually a board with paper chits stuck onto it like a calendar, showing the exact sequence of scenes to be shot. About Margot there was very much the sense of being a team member. She was in fact Merlin’s “executive assistant.”

What to do? Build another landing in a place with less current? More time, more money. Raine and Dana couldn’t care less. Lacy, my daughter, didn’t even hear. She was looking at Raine as usual, mouth slightly open.

Margot knitted her brows and drummed all ten fingers furiously on the table. “Jesus, we can’t lose another day.” She even enjoyed the hassles.

Margot saved the day. In fact her triumph was complete.

She snapped her fingers. “Hold it!” she said to no one in particular. “Just hold it. I may have an idea. Let me make one phone call.”

When she returned, she was flushed with pleasure and excitement, but she kept her voice offhand. “What about this, Bobby?” she asked Merlin, stretching up her arms and yawning. When she stretched up her arms like that, her completely smooth axillae flattened and showed two wavelets of muscle.

She had remembered there was a steamboat on False River, a cut-off backwater of the Mississippi. “It’s small, almost a miniature, but so are the landings there. And there’s no current. What we could do is a long shot of the boat coming into the Dernier landing, which is tiny, of a scale with the boat. I know the Derniers well. What’s more, the Dernier house even looks like a miniature Belle Isle. You could cut to the roofline over the levee and no one could tell the difference.”

Merlin thought about it. He nodded. “We’ll go with that,” he said casually, almost curtly, without looking at her. She could have been a pool secretary. “Okay. Call Jacoby.”

It was the businesslikeness of course which pleased her so much. Now she was not only one of them but a valued one.

When she was happy or excited, her freckles turned plum-colored. Her pigment darkened with the moon. I could gauge her sexual desire by her freckles.

Then surely my “discovery” was wrong. She was as happy as a child, so happy she reached over and hugged me, not Merlin. Merlin paid no attention to her. His white-rimmed blue eye engaged mine as usual. He wanted to talk about an article of mine, really no more than a note, about an obscure Civil War skirmish in these parts, published in the Louisiana Historical Journal. He had taken the trouble to look it up.

As usual I was first to leave the table. It was my custom (all of a sudden I realized how much of my life had become a custom) to leave them to their movie talk, pay a visit to Siobhan and Tex, and arrive at my pigeonnier in time for the ten o’clock news. It had become important to me in recent years to hear the news every hour — though nothing of importance had happened for years. What did I expect to happen?

But this time I did something different. I left the worn path of my life. Once out of sight, instead of crossing to the stairs. I turned left into the dark parlor next to the dining room, from which it was separated by sliding oak doors. A few minutes earlier I had noticed that the door was open some six inches. It was possible, standing with my back against the door, to hear the diners and by moving from side to side to see their reflection in the dim pier mirror on the opposite wall. The images traveled some fifty feet, thirty feet from diner to mirror, twenty feet back to me. Lucy, my daughter, was at one end of the table. Even from this distance it was possible to see in the small blur of her face how like and unlike her mother she is, Lucy, my first wife. There is the same little lift and lilt when she moves her head but the features are both grosser and more gorgeous, like a Carolina wildflower transplanted to the Louisiana tropics. For her, Lucy. Belle Isle was no more than a place to stay. We were not close. She and Margot didn’t like each other much. My son? I had not seen my son since he quit college and went to live in a streetcar behind the car barn.

Presently Lucy left.

Margot, Merlin, and Dana talked. There was the sound in their voices of my not being there.

Two small events occurred.

Margot leaned over Merlin to say something to Raine I could not hear, her hair brushing past his face. When Margot spoke, she had a way of swaying against her listener, so that her shoulder and arm touched him. He leaned back, absently, politely, to make room, but as her shoulder rose — is her hand propped on his knee? he took a mock bite of the bare brown flesh at his mouth, not really a bite; he set his teeth on the skin. So perfunctory an act it was, he hardly seemed aware of doing it. His fixed blue gaze did not shift.

“Okay,” said Merlin presently. “So we’ll use the pigeonnier for Raine and Dana’s fight. I agree. The checkerboard lighting pattern would be much more effective than a slave cabin. Still, I like—”

“What about Rudy?” Dana asked, I think he asked. Rudy? What was Rudy? Did he say Rudy? I don’t think he said Rudy.

No one seemed to be listening.

“What?” said Merlin after a minute.

Raine bobbed her head to and fro, propping and unpropping her cheek with her finger, hair falling away. She was humming a tune.

Again Margot leaned across Merlin to answer. I could not hear.

I could hear my absence in Raine’s voice. She was different. There had grown up between us a kind of joking flirtation. She was Dana’s girl, of course. But I could tell her how beautiful she was (she was) and unbend enough to kiss her when we met, kiss on the mouth the way they all do. She could tell me how beautiful I was (am I?). When we were in a room with people, there existed a joking agreement between us that she would be attentive to me, would not turn her back even if she is talking to someone else. It was as if we pretended to be married and jealous of each other. But now without me she was different.

Rudy? Who is Rudy? Me? Why Rudy?

Raine was humming a tune, or rather making as if she were humming a tune, a child’s head-bobbing tune, as if it were a signal.

Was the tune “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”?

Is that because I drink and sometimes have a red nose?

Is it because Rudolph had antlers?

Did Dana say Rudy? Actually I do not really think he did.

How strange it is that a discovery like this, of evil, of a kinsman’s dishonesty, a wife’s infidelity, can shake you up, knock you out of your rut, be the occasion of a new way of looking at things!

In the space of one evening I had made the two most important discoveries of my life. I discovered my wife’s infidelity and five hours later I discovered my own life. I saw it and myself clearly for the first time.

Can good come from evil? Have you ever considered the possibility that one might undertake a search not for God but for evil? You people may have been on the wrong track all these years with all that talk about God and signs of his existence, the order and beauty of the universe — that’s all washed up and you know it. The more we know about the beauty and order of the universe, the less God has to do with it. I mean, who cares about such things as the Great Watchmaker?

But what if you could show me a sin? a purely evil deed, an intolerable deed for which there is no explanation? Now there’s a mystery. People would sit up and take notice. I would be impressed. You could almost make a believer out of me.

In times when nobody is interested in God, what would happen if you could prove the existence of sin, pure and simple? Wouldn’t that be a windfall for you? A new proof of God’s existence! If there is such a thing as sin, evil, a living malignant force, there must be a God!

I’m serious. When was the last time you saw a sin? Oh, you’ve seen quite a few? Well, I haven’t, not lately. I mean a pure unadulterated sin. You’re not going to tell me that some poor miserable slob of a man who beats up his own child has committed a sin?

You don’t look impressed. Yes, you know me too well. I was only joking. Well, half joking.

But joking aside. I must explain my second discovery. After I walked out of the dark parlor, where no one ever sat, and quietly out the front door. I took a different route to my pigeonnier. A tiny event but significant. Because it was only when I did this that I realized that I had taken exactly the same route for months, even years. I had actually made a path. My life had fallen into such a rut that it was possible to set one’s watch (Suellen told me this) when I walked out the front door at night. It must be two minutes to ten because he likes to get there just in time to turn on the ten o’clock news. News of what? What did I expect to happen? What did I want to happen?

No. First, I paid a visit to Siobhan and Tex. who talked about runny babbits.

“I liked the bunny rabbits,” said Siobhan, hugging my neck.

“You like those runny babbits!” cried Tex, still holding out his hands for her and, thinking he’d made a joke, kept on repeating it: “I told you you’d like those runny babbits!”

Tex got on her nerves, in fact bored the hell out of her. It was almost as if he knew it and wanted to, enjoyed the mindlessness of runny babbits.

Siobhan escaped both of us, squatted under the TV livid in the phosphorescent light, her cloudy blue eyes not even then quite focused on the big-eyed cartoon animals.

Tex, of course, got on his next favorite subject, not chivvying Siobhan with his bad jokes but chivvying me for my neglectful ways. He couldn’t get over the fact that I had allowed Margot to rebuild the old burned wing of Belle Isle over a gas well even though it had been capped.

For the tenth time he upbraided me in his fond jabbing inattentive way. Was it his wealth, I often wondered, which gave him license to be such a pain, a prodding tunnel-visioned unheeding bore, or had he gotten rich because he was such a pain?

Yet he was a friendly-seeming pleasant-looking fellow with his big-nosed Indian-brown face, slicked-down black-dyed hair, liver-spotted muscular arms. At first sight one might take him for a golf pro, an old seasoned, whiskey-cured sun-drenched Sam Snead — until one noticed that he was not, that his way of standing around hands on hips was not like a golfer at all but the way an oilfield roughneck stands slouched at his alert ease, waits his moment while great machinery hums, heavy pipes swing, chains clank. Yes, that was it, that was his happiness and unhappiness: idleness can be happy only if the machinery is running and one looks on with a presiding interest, comforted as only machinery, one’s own machinery, can comfort. His sudden riches had stunned him. In the silence of wealth he felt deprived, deafened, and so he must reach out, grab, poke, drive Siobhan crazy.

“When are you going to cement that well in?”

“There’s nothing left down there but a little marsh gas, Tex.”

“How you get by with having a Christmas tree under your house beats me.” He can’t or won’t listen.

“It was put there before the state law was passed. Anyhow, it’s only a small shallow well.”

“It still has two hundred pounds of pressure.”

“Christ, no. Thirty pounds at the outside.”

“—two hundred pounds in rotten wartime black pipe.”

Christ, you stupid Texas bastard, why don’t you listen?

“It’s got to be sealed,” Tex droned on. “A Christmas tree won’t do it. The only way to seal a well is to cement it.”

“I know.”

“How in hell can Maggie seal a producing well and build a house over it?”

On he went, poking me like poking Siobhan, poking and not listening, not even listening to himself. His fond unhappy eyes drifted away. Even his expert opinion was nutty. In the same breath he complained about the well producing and not producing and didn’t listen long enough to hear the contradiction. Getting rich had made him so miserable he must make everyone miserable.

Why didn’t I do something about Siobhan, not about the well, which I couldn’t have cared less about, whether it produced or not, went dry or blew up, but why didn’t I do something about Siobhan? Either throw Tex out or give her back to Suellen or both. They’d both be better off. Christ, for all I knew Tex was fooling with her. Doesn’t it happen sometimes with fine fond upstanding grandfathers? You nod. You mean they’re penitent afterwards? Good for them. Suellen was good to Siobhan before and would be again. She had raised me, thousands of Suellens had raised thousands like me, kept us warm in the kitchen, saved us from our fond bemused batty parents, my father screwed up by poesy, dreaming of Robert E. Lee and Lancelot Andrewes and Episcopal chapels in the wildwood, and my poor stranded mother going out for joyrides with Uncle Harry.

Why didn’t I do something about Siobhan earlier? Here’s a confession, Father. Because I didn’t really care, and that had nothing to do with her not being my daughter (that made me feel better, gave me an excuse). We are supposed to “love” our children. But what does that mean?

Yet, and here’s the strangest thing of all, it was only after my discovery, after I found out that Siobhan was not my child, that I was able to do something about it. Since Siobhan was not my child, I could help her! It was simple after all: (1) Tex was bad for the child, (2) something should be done, (3) nobody was doing anything or even noticing, (4) therefore I would tell Tex to move back to New Orleans and let Suellen take care of Siobhan.

Why couldn’t I take care of her? To tell you the truth, she got on my nerves.

Why didn’t I love Siobhan when I thought she was my own child? Well, I suppose I “loved” her. What is love? Why this dread coldness toward those closest to you and most innocent? Have families ever loved each other except when some dread thing happens to somebody?

Oh, yes, you speak of love. That is easy to do. But do you wish to know my theory? That sort of love is impossible now if it ever was. The only way it will ever be possible again is if the world should end.

Siobhan turned fretfully to the TV to watch the animated cartoon.

“What a coinkidinki!” Tex cried, hugging Siobhan. “Just when you asked about runny babbits. Tex turned on the TV and there they were.”

“Say coincidence,” I told Tex.

“What’s that?” he asked quickly, cupping his ear, listening for the first time.

“I said, don’t say coinkidinki to her, for Christ’s sake. Say coincidence.”

“All right. Lance,” said Tex. He listened! Maybe he hadn’t listened to me before because I hadn’t told him anything.

I pondered. Could it be true all one needs to know nowadays is what one wants?

Leaving the pleached alley of oaks, my usual route, I cut across the meadowlike front yard, took the gardener’s gate through the iron fence, and climbed the levee.

Believe it or not. I had not seen the river for years. A diesel towboat was pushing an acre of barges against the current. It sounded like a freight engine spinning its wheels. I turned around. Belle Isle looked like an isle, a small dark islet hemmed in by Ethyl pipery, Dow towers. Kaiser stacks, all humming away. Farther away, near the highway, gas burnoffs flared in the night as if giant hunters still stalked the old swamp.

The stars were dim but by following the handle of the dipper I recognized Arcturus, which my father showed me years ago. My father: a failed man who missed the boat all around but who knew how far away Arcturus was. He was editor of a local weekly, where he published his own poems and historical vignettes about this region on such subjects as St. Andrew’s Chapel: the First Non-Roman Church in the Parish (I remember thinking that my ancestors must have arrived here to find the swamp teeming not with wild Indians but with Romans). The Kiwanis Club gave him a certificate officially entitling him the Poet Laureate of Feliciana Parish. He was an ordinary newspaper poet, an ordinary newspaper historian, and he had an ordinary newspaperman’s wonder about science.

“Think of it,” he said, standing in this spot and showing me Arcturus. “The light you are seeing started thirty years ago!”

I thought about it. In those days we thought about such things.

But what I was thinking that night a year ago was not how strange it was that light from Arcturus started out thirty years ago (when we were listening to Parkyakarkus and Frank Mann, the Golden Voice of Radio) but how strangely one’s own life had turned out during these same thirty years while Arcturus’ light went booming down the long, lonesome corridors of space.

Then for the first time I saw myself and my life just as surely as if I were standing in the dark parlor and watching myself sitting at the table with Margot.

Do you know what happened to me during the past twenty years? A gradual, ever so gradual, slipping away of my life into a kind of dream state in which finally I could not be sure that anything was happening at all. Perhaps nothing happened.

That, after all, is quite a discovery for the man you knew, president of the student body, all-conference halfback. Most Likely to Succeed. Rhodes scholar, Golden Glover, holder of the record of the Longest Punt Return in the entire U.S.A.

Clearly you haven’t done too well either. You know what our trouble was? We liked to go to school too much. And into the service. I managed to stay in school or the service until I was thirty-two. And you with your M.D., D.D. In fact, aren’t you taking some courses at Tulane now?

I practiced law in a small town on the River Road. I say practice in quotes, so to speak, because I found that I was doing less and less law as time went on. True, times got harder, business was slow. In the end I was doing a couple of hours of title work a day and that was it.

One good thing about small towns: it was convenient to come home for lunch. Margot was usually there at first. We’d have a drink or two or three before lunch — something she was used to doing with her lady friends in New Orleans. That was a pleasure. After Suellen’s lovely lunch, we often made love. Not a bad life! drink well, eat well, and make love to Margot. I fell into the custom of taking a nap. The naps grew longer. Then one day, I did not go back to the office in the afternoon. Instead, and as an excuse because it was said to be good for one, I took up golf. The three other members of the foursome were Cahill Clayton Lamar, cousin and failed gentry like me, bad dentist, good golfer; and two successful newcomers, the undertaker and the chiropractor.

But golf is a bore. I quit.

During the sixties I was a liberal. In those days one could say “I was such and such.” Categories made sense — now it is impossible to complete the sentence: I am a — what? Certainly not a liberal. A conservative? What is that? But then it was a pleasure to take the blacks’ side: one had the best of two worlds: the blacks were right and I wanted to be unpopular with the whites. It was a question of boredom. Nothing had happened since I ran 110 yards against Alabama — we lived for great deeds, you remember, unlike the Creoles, who have a gift for the trivial, for making money, for scrubbing tombs, for Mardi Gras. The sixties were a godsend to me. The blacks after all were right, the whites were wrong, and it was a pleasure to tell them so. I became unpopular. There are worse things than being disliked: it keeps one alive and alert. But in the seventies the liberals had nothing more to do. They were finished. I can’t decide whether we won or lost. In any case, in the seventies ordinary whites and blacks both turned against the liberals. Perhaps they were right. In the end, liberals become a pain in the ass even to themselves. At any rate, the happy strife of the sixties was all over. The other day I ran into a black man with whom I had once stood shoulder to shoulder defying angry whites. We hardly recognized each other. We eyed each other uneasily. There was nothing to say. He told me had had a slight stroke, nothing serious. We had won. So he bought a color TV, took up golf, and developed hypertension. I became an idler.

I gave up golf and stayed home to do a bit of reading and even some research and writing: the Civil War of course: nobody knew much about what happened in these parts. I even wrote a learned article or two. Sometimes I took the tourists around Belie Isle, like my grandfather before me. But instead of telling them Eleanor Roosevelt jokes as he did, I gave them scholarly disquisitions on the beauty of plantation life, somewhat tongue-in-cheek — to see how far I could go without getting a rise from these good Midwestern folk — hell, I found out it’s impossible to get a rise from them, they hate the niggers worse than we ever did. Things are not so simple as they seem, I told them. There is something to be said for the master-slave relation: the strong, self-reliant, even piratical master who carves a regular barony in the wilderness and lives like Louis XIV, yet who treats his slaves well, and so help me they weren’t so bad off on Belle Isle. They became first-class artisans, often were given their freedom, and looked down on the white trash. “Now take a look at this slave cabin, ladies and gentlemen. Is it so bad? Nice high ceilings, cool rooms, front porch, brick chimney, cypress floors. Great arching oaks back yard and front. Do you prefer your little brick bungalow in Lansing?” They watched me carefully to catch the drift and either nodded seriously or laughed. It’s impossible to insult anybody from Michigan.

On winter afternoons it began to get dark early — five o’clock. Elgin would build us a fire and Margot and I would have several drinks before supper.

During the day I found myself looking forward to radio news on the hour. At night we watched TV and drank brandies. After the ten o’clock news I had usually grown sleepy enough to go to bed.

So what was my discovery? that for the last few years I had done nothing but fiddle at law, fiddle at history, keep up with the news (why?), watch Mary Tyler Moore, and drink myself into unconsciousness every night.

Now I remember almost everything, except — Every event in the past, the most trivial imaginable, comes back with crystal clarity. It’s that one night I blank out on — no, not blank out, but somehow can’t make the effort to remember. It seems to require a tremendous effort to focus on. What I remember is that miserable Janos Jacoby looking up at me, the firelight in the trees … The headlines come back.

SCION CRAZED BY GRIEF. RESTRAINED FROM ENTERING HOUSE. HANDS BURNED.

That night. I can’t get hold of it. Oh, I try to, but my mind slides back to the past or forward to the future.

I can remember perfectly what happened years ago, like the time we, you and I, were riding down the river on a fraternity-sorority party and were passing Jefferson Island, which lies between Mississippi and Louisiana, was claimed by both states, and in a sense belonged to neither, a kind of desert island in the middle of the U.S., so you, drinking and solitary as usual, said to no one in particular: “I think it would be nice to spend a few days in such a place,” pulled off your coat, and dove off the Tennessee Belle (that was an “act” too, wasn’t it?); I, of course, having to go after you as usual, taking just time enough to wrap some matches in a tobacco pouch, and even so it took me three hours to find you huddled shivering under a log, looking bluer than Nigger Jim and more emaciated than usual; you, ever the one to do the ultimate uncalled-for thing — I never really knew whether it was a real thing or a show-off thing. And do you know, I’ve often wondered whether your going off to the seminary out of a clear sky was not more of the same — the ultimate reckless lifetime thing. Hell, you were not Christian let alone Catholic as far as anyone could notice. So wasn’t it just like your diving off the Tennessee Belle to go from unbeliever to priest, leapfrogging on the way some eight hundred million ordinary Catholics? Was that too an act, the ultimate show-off thing or the ultimate splendid thing? You shrug and smile. And as if that weren’t enough, you weren’t content to be an ordinary priest. Father John from New Orleans; no, you had to take off for Uganda or was it Biafra? You had to go to medical school and outdo Albert Schweitzer, because of course that was outdoing even him, wasn’t it, because you had the True Faith and he didn’t, being only a Protestant.

And it didn’t turn out too well, did it? Else why are you here?

Something is wrong, isn’t it? Have you lost your faith? or is it a woman?

Is that all you can do, look at me with that same old hooded look? You smile and shrug. Christ, you don’t even know the answer yourself.

But you left, you see. And you might have stayed. Maybe you were needed here. Maybe I needed you worse than the Biafrans. If you’d been around all those years … Christ, why is it that I could never talk to anybody but you? Well, you’re here now and I can use you. I’ve discovered that I can talk to you and get closer to it, the secret I know yet don’t know. So I’ll start behind it and work up to it, or I’ll start ahead of it and work back.

My mind slides forward, to the future, to the person next door. I have an idea even crazier than one of yours. It is that somehow the future, my future, is tied up with her, that we, she and I, must start all over. Did I tell you that I saw her yesterday? Just a glimpse as I ventured out on one of my infrequent forays, this time for my monthly physical and mental examination. Her door was open. She was thin and black-haired but I couldn’t see her face; it was turned to the wall, that wall, her knees drawn up. Her calves were slim but well-developed and still surprisingly suntanned. Had she been a dancer? a tennis player? She reminded me of Lucy.

Here’s my crazy plan for the future. When I leave here, having served my time or been “cured,” I don’t want to go back to Belle Isle. I don’t want to go back to any place. The only thing I’m sure of is that the past is absolutely dead. The future must be absolutely new. This is true not only of me but of you and of everyone. A new beginning must be made. People must begin all over again, as tentatively as strangers meeting on Jefferson Island (didn’t you have something like that in mind when you spoke of the “peculiar possibilities” of Jefferson Island?). I want to go with her, a mute, psychotic, totally ravaged and defiled woman, take her to a little cottage over there — close to the river beyond Magazine Street — a little Negro shotgun cottage, and there take care of her. We could speak simply. “Are you hungry?” “Are you cold?” Perhaps we could take a walk on the levee. In the new world it will be possible to enjoy simple things once again.

But first I must communicate with her, I realize that. Have you tried talking with her? She won’t talk? She’s turned her face to the wall and that’s that.

A new life. I began a new life over a year ago when I walked out of that dark parlor after leaving the supper table. Or rather walked into that dark parlor. Now I believe there will be a third new life, just as there are three worlds, the old dead past world, the hopeless screwed-up now world, and the unknown world of the future.

So anyhow I began my new life then when I stepped out of my life routine worn bare and deep as a cowpath across a meadow, climbed out of my rut, stopped listening to the news and Mary Tyler Moore. And strangely, stopped drinking and smoking. The second I left my old life’s cowpath, I discovered I didn’t need a drink. It became possible to stand still in the dark under the oaks, hands at my sides, and watch and wait.

I forgot to tell you another thing that happened in the parlor, a small but perhaps significant thing. As I stepped into the parlor with its smell of lemon wax and damp horsehair, I stopped and shut my eyes a moment to get used to the darkness. Then as I crossed the room to the sliding doors, something moved in the corner of my eye. It was a man at the far end of the room. He was watching me. He did not look familiar. There was something wary and poised about the way he stood, shoulders angled, knees slightly bent as if he were prepared for anything. He was mostly silhouette but white on black like a reversed negative. His arms were long, one hanging lower and lemur-like from dropped shoulder. His head was cocked, turned enough so I could see the curve at the back. There was a sense about him of a vulnerability guarded against, an overcome gawkiness, a conquered frailty. Seeing such a man one thought first: Big-headed smart-boy type; then thought again: But he’s big too. If he hadn’t developed his body, worked out, he’d have a frail neck, two tendons, and a hollow between, balancing that big head. He looked like a long-distance runner who has conquered polio. He looked like a smart sissy rich boy who has devoted his life to getting over it.

Then I realized it was myself reflected in the dim pier mirror.

When I returned to the pigeonnier cold sober, I took a good look at myself in the mirror, something I hadn’t done for a long time. It was as if I had been avoiding my own eye for the past few years.

Looking at oneself in a mirror is a self-canceling phenomenon. Eyes looking into eyes make a hole which spreads out and renders one invisible. I had seen more of myself in that single glimpse of a ghostly image in the pier mirror, not knowing it was I.

What did I see? It is hard to say, but it appeared to be a man gone to seed. Do you remember the picture of Lancelot disgraced, discovered in adultery with the queen, banished, living in the woods, stretched out on a rock, chin cupped in both hands, bloodshot eyes staring straight ahead, yellow hair growing down over his brows? But it’s a bad comparison. My bloodshot eyes were staring too but it was not so much the case of my screwing the queen as the queen getting screwed by somebody else.

I moved closer. The cheek showed the razor track of the morning’s shave; above it, the demarcated swatch of light fuzz on the knoll of the cheekbone. Capillaries were rising to the surface but had not yet turned into spiders. The nose was not broken, despite football and boxing, not red, blackheaded. The eyes showed a broken vessel and a blood spot like a fertile egg. There were grains in the lashes. The hair roots were not quite clean and were dandruff-flaked. The lips were cracked. The fingernails were black. The chin showed patches of beard missed by the razor. I shaved carelessly and washed seldom. More like Ben Gunn than Lancelot.

Five, six, seven years of unacknowledged idleness (it takes work to be idle and not acknowledge it), drinking and watching TV, working at play, playing at work — what does it do to a man? My hands were open in front of my face. The fingers closed and opened. I felt like Rip van Winkle waking up and testing his bones. Was anything broken? Was I still in one piece?

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.

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.

“Do you have to go back with them?”

“I’d as soon stay. Do you live here alone?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not married?”

“No. I was. My wife’s dead. I have a son and daughter, but they’re off at school.”

“I thought Mr. and Mrs. Lamar were husband and wife.”

“No, son and mother. But my mother died last year.”

“And you’re here alone?”

“Yes.”

“All by yourself?”

“Except for my son and daughter, but they’re seldom here.”

“I’d be here all the time!” she cried, looking around.

“I am.”

“I see,” she said not listening, but looking, not missing a trick. She did see, she never stopped seeing. “What a lovely studio apartment this would make. And the little iron spiral staircase. Priceless! Do you know what this would rent for in New Orleans?”

“No.”

“Two fifty at least.”

“I could use it.”

“You mean you don’t do all this”—she nodded toward the buses, now moving out in a slow caravan—“just to show your beautiful house?”

“I do it to make money. I don’t like to show my beautiful house.”

“Mmmm.” What I didn’t know at the time was how directly her mind worked. What she was thinking was: I have ten million dollars and you don’t; you have a great house and I don’t; you have a name and I don’t; but you don’t have me. You are a solitary sort and don’t think much about women but now you do. “Feel how cold I am.”

“All right.”

She took my hand and put it on her bare shoulder. Her flesh was firm and cool but there was a warmth under the cool.

“You’ve got a big hand. Look how small it makes mine look.” She measured our hands, palm to palm.

“It’s not all that small.”

“No, it’s not. Hoo hoo! Haw haw!” she guffawed. “You could put a bathroom there.” She pointed both our hands toward a closet of flower pots. “A kitchenette there. Bedroom up there. Think of it! I saw Beauvoir last week. Jeff Davis had a place like this. Let me fix it up for you.”

“All right.”

“What a cunning little place!” Cunning. Where did she get that? Not Odessa. I hadn’t heard it for years. That’s what my mother’s generation said, meaning cute, adorable, charming. Margot herself, not really a good actress, nevertheless had a good ear. She could have listened to my mother for five minutes, ear cocked, and made cunning her own. “I’d put a planter there, use an old stained-glass door, hang my Utrillos there.”

“Real Utrillos?’

She nodded absently. “Those walls!” She was taking in the famous octagon angles.

We were drinking all the while. She drank from the fifth as easily as if it were a Coke, using her tongue to measure and stop the flow. It had stopped raining. The sun broke out over the levee and the room glowed with a warm rosy light from the slave bricks. Outside, little frogs began to peep in the ditches.

“Couldn’t we get more comfortable? I’m totaled.” She simply lay down on the glider mattress, propping her head on one hand. “No pillow?”

The nearest thing to a pillow I could find was a foam-rubber cylinder, a boat fender. We took another drink. She patted the mattress. Such was the dimension of mattress and pillow that the only way we could use them was to lie close facing each other.

The sun came out before it set. We lay together in the rosy dusk, heads propped on the boat fender, which seemed to have a thrust of its own. There was nowhere to put my arm but across her waist. Below it, her pantalooned hip rose like a wave.

“You’re very sexy in seersuckers,” she said, absent-mindedly drumming her fingers on my hip. She was a little drunk but also a little preoccupied. It was strange, but lying with her I became conscious of myself, my own body stirring against the hot crinkled fabric.

I kissed her. Or rather our mouths came together because they had no other place to go. As we kissed, the sunny bourbon on our lips, her wide mouth opened and bade me enter, welcoming me like a new home. It was her head which came around, up and over onto mine. My hot sweated seersucker commingled with her orris root and rained-on flesh and damp crinoline. Outside in the ditches the rain frogs had found their voices and were peeping in chorus. Her fine leg, pantalooned and harlequined — not quite genuine belle was she but more Texan come to Mardi Gras — rose, levitated, and crossed over my body. There it lay sweet and heavy.

We laughed with the joy of the place and being there, and drank and kissed and I felt the deep runnel of her back above her pantaloons.

“Does the door lock?” she asked.

“It’s not necessary, but if it will make you feel better.” I got up and locked the door, turning an eight-inch iron key and driving a dead bolt home with a clack.

“My God, it sounds like the dungeon at Chillon. Let me see that key.”

I lay down and gave her the iron key. She held it in one hand and me in the other and was equally fond of both. She liked antiques and making love. As she examined it, she imprisoned me with her sweet heavy thigh as if she had to keep me still while she calculated the value of the iron key. I had to laugh out loud. I was just getting onto her drollness and directness. She might just as well have said: I’ve got something sweet for you, old boy, the sweetest something you’ll ever have but hold it a minute while I look at this old key. She had a passion for old “authentic” things. Texas must have everything but old things.

She was right, she had something sweet and she knew as only a woman can know, with absolute certitude, that she had me, that through some odd coming together of time and place and circumstance and her equally odd mixture of calculation, drollness, and her cool-fleshed hot like of me — oh yes, she wanted me as well as my house — she infallibly knew where the vector of desire converged, the warm cottoned-off place between her legs, the sheer negativity and want and lack where the well-fitted cotton dipped and went away. I kissed the cotton there.

We drank and laughed at the joy of the time and the discovery: that we each had what the other wanted, not exactly “love” as the word is used, but her new ten million and my old house, her sweet West Texas self and my just as sweet Louisiana Anglo-Saxon aristocracy gone to pot, well-born English lord Sterling Hayden gone to seed in Macao. It was like a rare royal betrothal, where the betrothed like each other as well. Like? Love. Laugh and shout with joy at the happiness between them.

Her calculation and cool casting ahead delighted me. As her thigh lay across me, it seemed to be sentient of itself, assigned as it was the task of fathoming the life beneath it, and even as we kissed her eyes were agleam and not quite closed as she took in the pigeonnier. big enough for a thousand pigeons or one man. An “architectural gem” she called it.

But what is love? I thought even then. For by your dear sweet Jesus I did love her there for her droll mercinariness and between her sweet legs and in her mouth and her splendid deep strong runneled back sinking dizzily into a narrow solid waist before it flared into the loveliest ass in all West Texas, but loved as well her droll direct Texas way and even her quickness in overlaying it with Dallas acting-school lingo. New Orleans uptown talk, and God knew what else.

At heart she was a collector, preserver, restorer, transformer; even me and herself she transformed: to take an old neglected abused thing, save it, restore it, put it to new and charming use. She loved to drink, laugh, and make love, but almost as well, better maybe, and orgasmically too, she liked cleaning away a hundred years of pigeon shit and finding lovely oiled-with-guano cypress underneath, turning a dovecote into a study, me into Jefferson Davis writing his memoirs. She was a Texas magician.

It was different from being “in love.” I was “in love” with Lucy Cobb, my first wife.

The first time I saw Lucy Cobb: on the tennis court at Highlands, North Carolina, I the Louisiana outlander and ill-at-ease among the easy ingrown Georgians and Carolinians, not knowing them or quite how to dress and so dressed up wrong in coat and tie in late afternoon and standing off a ways under a tree, hands in pockets watching the tennis players, and thinking despite myself: What a shame you all don’t know who I am, for in Louisiana people would, Louisiana being what it is, a small American Creole republic valuing sports, fistfights, cockfights, contests, shootouts, Gunsmoke. winning, and above all, football, and there I was in what turned out to be the high tide of my life what with being chosen Athlete of the Year by Y.M.B.C. and Rhodes scholar besides, like Whizzer White, which latter contributed nothing to my fame except a storied exotic detail (“… and he’s smart too!”) — the South a very big place after all and the rough camaraderie of Louisiana not necessarily working here in the muted manners of the east South, where people seemed to come and go, meet and part by agreed-upon but unspoken rules. I was famous in Louisiana, as famous as the Governor, and for one reason alone: running 110 yards against mighty Alabama, and unknown in Carolina.

Lucy’s smooth thin brown legs scissored and flashed under her white skirt. When she hit the ball, she got her body into it, shoulders, back, and even a final flex of pelvis. She must have played tennis all her life. Decorous as she stood talking, lounged at the net, laughed, spun her racket, eyes cast down, when she served, her body arched back, then in full reach stretched, then flexed and swung in mock-erotic abandon. Served to, she waited in an easy crouch, shifting her weight to and fro.

What I see even now when I think of her is the way she picked up the ball or rather did not pick it up but toed it onto her racket in a cunning little turning in of her white-shod foot. No, not thin was she but slim, because her joints, ankle, wrist, elbow did not show bone but were a simple articulation.

Her face a brown study under her parted straight brown hair done up in back, the irises so contracted in her smiling brown eyes that she seemed both blind and fond. There was a tiny straight scar on her upper lip, diamonded with sweat, which gave the effect of a slight pout. It was more of a quirk I discovered later, the lip forever atremble, trembling on the very point of joke, irony, anger, deprecation.

There was to be a dance that night out of doors under the stars and Japanese lanterns. How to ask her? Just ask her?

What did I want? Just to dance with her, to hold that quick brown body in my arms not even close but lightly and away so I could see into her face and catch those brown eyes with mine.

Then what to do? Go blundering into the four of them between sets and straight out ask her? Skulk behind a tree and waylay her on her way to her cottage? Without being introduced? What arcane Georgia-Carolina rule would that break?

As it turned out, of course, yes I should have asked her, asked her any way at all, and of course there were no rules. And as it turned out, she had noticed me too, as girls do: seeing without looking and wondering who that tall boy was looking at her, hands in pockets under his tree. Why doesn’t he come over and state his business? Why doesn’t he ask me to the dance? She was direct: later when I showed up in her parents’ cottage and stood about smiling and watching her, uncharacteristically shy (what were the cottage rules?), she would even say it: Well? State your business.

We were married, moved into Belle Isle, had two children. Then she died. I suppose her death was tragic. But to me it seemed simply curious. How curious that she should grow pale, thin, weak, and die in a few months! Her blood turned to milk — the white cells replaced the red cells. How curious to wake up one morning alone again in Belle Isle, just as I had been alone in my youth!

Jesus, come in and sit down. You look awful. You look like the patient this morning, not me. Why so pale and sad? After all, you’re supposed to have the good news, not me. Knowing you, I think I know what ails you. You believe all right, but you’re thinking, Christ, what’s the use? Has your God turned his back on you? It was easier in Biafra, wasn’t it, than in plain old Louisiana, U.S.A.?

Well, at least I have good news. The girl in the next room answered my knock! I knocked and she knocked back! She has not caught on that we might invent a new language. She just repeats the one knock, two knocks. That is a beginning, a communication of sorts, isn’t it? When I tried a sentence, not who are you but how are you (because h has only eight knocks against w’s twenty-three), she fell silent.

How to simplify the code? Or what do you think of a note passed out my window and into hers? See how I’ve straightened out this coat hanger, but it’s not enough. Two coat hangers, perhaps.

What? Why not just go around and see her?

But she will not speak to anyone. Hm. You see that is the point. To make conversation in the old tongue, the old worn-out language. It can’t be done.

On the other hand, I could go to her door and knock twice. She would know who it was and could knock or not knock.

Then do what? Talk? Talk about what? Some years ago I discovered that I had nothing to say to anybody nor anybody to me, that is, anything worth listening to. There is nothing left to say. So I stopped talking. Until you showed up. I don’t know why I want to talk to you or what I need to tell you or need to hear from you. There is something … about that night … I discovered something. It’s strange: I have to tell you in order to know what I already know. I talk, you don’t. Perhaps you know even better than I that too much has been said already. Perhaps I talk to you because of your silence. Your silence is the only conversation I can listen to.

Then what do I want of her, the woman next door?

In some strange way she is like Lucy. Lucy was a virgin! and I did not want her otherwise. What I wanted was to dance with her on a summer night, hold her lightly and look into her eyes. I wanted Margot’s sweet Texas ass and I wanted Lucy’s opaque Georgia eyes.

This girl in the next cell is not a virgin. She was raped by three men in one night and then forced to perform fellatio on them.

I’ve learned more about her. In fact, I managed to catch a glimpse of her chart while the nurses were off in the lounge drinking coffee. She is twenty-nine and comes, like Lucy, from Georgia. She dropped out of Agnes Scott, a fine young-ladies’ school, and went to live in an artists’ community in La Jolla. The standard boring story of our times. Then, thinking better of it, of California and the New Life (which of course is not a new life at all but the last spasm of the old, the logical and inevitable culmination, the very caricature of the old, the new life being nothing more or less than what their parents would do if they dared), she removed to the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, lived in Desire project, offered herself up in service to mankind. Whereupon mankind took her up on her offer, raped her for her pains, and left her for dead in the Quarter.

Then how is she like Lucy? How is she the Lucy of the new world? Is it because the violation she suffered has in some sense restored her virginity, much as a person recovering from the plague is immune to the plague? I don’t quite know why she is so much like Lucy except that I want the same thing of her I wanted from Lucy: to come close but keep a little distance between us, to ask the simplest questions in a new language—How are you—just to hear the sound of her voice, to touch the tips of her fingers, to hand her through an open door ahead of me, my hand pressed lightly against the small of her back. The night of the day I discovered Margot’s infidelity, I left my old life path, became sober for the first time in years, bathed, shaved, dressed in clean clothes, and spent the night wide awake and watchful in my plantation rocker placed at such an angle that, looking through a window and the one clear pane of glass in the stained-glass door Margot had sure enough found for me (the final camp touch which Margot said would make the pigeonnier a charming little place and it did), I could see Belle Isle and most of the private drive.

My supper companions had left for the Holiday Inn about eleven o’clock to view the week’s rushes. That took no more than an hour, but afterwards they often got carried away by discussion, “more like knock-down-drag-out-argument,” said Margot, which went on till one or two in the morning.

How long would the knock-down-drag-out argument last that night, I wondered and, instead of drinking myself to sleep, stayed up to see.

She did not come home at all.

Or rather her Country Squire wagon, she alone in it, turned into the driveway at 8:30 the next morning, rolling so slowly that it hardly made a crunch in the pea gravel. As punctually as Kant setting out for the university at exactly six o’clock so that shopkeepers along the way could set their watches by him, it had been my custom to arise at exactly nine o’clock, stagger to a cold shower, and, of late, take a drink. At exactly 9:37 (two minutes after the news) I would take my seat at the breakfast table at Belle Isle. At 10:15 I was at my office, helping Negroes in the sixties, handling old ladies’ estates in the seventies.

That morning I sat in my plantation rocker, sober and clear-headed, and rocked for a while.

I sat down to breakfast at the usual time, Margot ate heartily, elbows on table, wiry head bent over steaming scrambled eggs. My hand shook slightly as I drank coffee; my stomach shrank as if braced against the first hot bourbon of the day.

“How were the rushes?”

“Oh. Christ. One abortion after another. The bloody color was off again. Bob was beside himself.”

Now bloody was the word. Merlin was not really English but lived there long enough so that everything was bloody this and bloody that.

In my new sobriety things were better and worse. My senses were acute, too acute. I became aware of the warp and woof of the tablecloth. My eyes followed one linen thread under and over, under and over. I noticed flecks of white porcelain showing through the worn gold leaf on the rim of the coffee cup where the lips touched it ninety degrees away from the handle. When Elgin touched me to see if I wanted more coffee, I nearly jumped out of my chair.

I watched Margot. She ate like a horse and looked fine, not fat but firm and full-armed. Ten years had turned her from callow coltish skittish-mustang Texas girl to assured chatelaine and mistress of Belle Isle, more Louisianian than Louisianians for they didn’t know what they were like and she did. Her face was if anything more soft-eyed and voluptuous, as only a thirty-two-year-old woman can be voluptuous. There was now a fine freckling over her bare shoulders from her golfing, like a lady golf pro. In the thin clear translucent skin beside the nose bridge, the freckles had merged into a darkening and dampening which in any other woman might have looked like circles under eyes but in her was simply plum-shadow and ripeness. When she sat down she settled herself, broadening her bottom to fit exactly the shallow B-shaped scoop of her chair.

Outwardly nothing was changed. Yet when I folded the newspaper and pushed back my chair to leave, she wiped the last crumb of bacon from her lip and said almost to herself: “I was tired afterwards — in fact I got sick as a dog so I stayed on at the Inn, barged in on Raine and just said, Sister, move over.”

Nothing was changed except that when she said that, I was pushing away from the table and I stopped a second both arms outstretched to the table’s edge. More than a second, for my eyes were on the second hand of my watch. A fly crawled along the gold band (gift from Margot). I waited for him to step off onto my wrist. He did. I watched him touch a hair. He did, crawling under it, everting and scrubbing his wings. As he did so, he moved the hair. The hair moved its root which moved a nerve which sent a message to my brain. I felt a tickle.

I went to my office as usual, came home for lunch as usual, returned to the pigeonnier as usual, but instead of having three drinks and taking a nap, I sent for Elgin.

Tell me something. Why did I have to know the truth about Margot and know it with absolute certainty? Or rather why, knowing the truth, did I have to know more, prove more, see? Does one need to know more, ever more and more, in order that one put off acting on it or maybe even not act at all?

But why? Why did it become the most important, the sole obsession of my very life, to determine whether or not Margot slept with Merlin when in fact I knew she had, or at least with somebody not me? You tell me, you being the doctor-scientist and soul expert as well, merchant of guilt and getting rid of it and of sorting out sins yet knowing as well as I that it, her fornication, anybody’s fornication, amounts to no more than molecules encountering molecules and little bursts of electrons along tiny nerves — no different in kind from that housefly scrubbing his wings under my hair.

Well, for once you look very solemn and unironic. Did I love her? you ask.

Love. Hm. The older I get, the less I know about such large subjects. I can say this. There was a time just before and after we were married when I could not not touch her. There was no getting enough of her. The very behavior I used to abhor in others I carried on with her and never a second thought or care in this world; touch her in public. Neck! Go to the A & P with her, heft the cold red beef flesh in one hand and hold her warm hand with the other and in the parking lot at four o’clock in the afternoon neck! Spoon! We’d drive down the road like white trash in a pickup truck, heads noodled together, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. thigh to thigh, my right hand thrust fondly between her legs.

Even later when we drank too much together, it was good, the drinking, drunkenness, and the coming together every whichway, on the floor, across the table, under the table, standing up in a coat closet at a party. There was no other thought than to possess her, as much of her with as much of me and any way at all, all ways and it seemed for always. Drinking, laughing, and loving, it is a good life. Not even marriage spoils it. For a while.

Did I love her then, that day I speak of? Love. No, not love. Not hatred, not even jealousy. What do those old words mean? Emotions? Were there ever any such things as emotions? If so, people have fewer emotions these days. Merlin’s actors could register fifteen standard emotions and not share a single real feeling between them.

No, my only “emotion” was a sense of suddenly coming alive, that peculiar wakefulness when a telephone rings in the middle of the night. That and an all-consuming curiosity. I had to know. If Merlin “knew” my wife, I had to know his knowing her.

Why? I don’t know. I ask you. That’s what I want with you. Not knowing why, I don’t really know why I did what I did. I only knew for the first time in years exactly what to do. I sent for Elgin.

Elgin was surprised to be summoned and more surprised to see me. No bottle, no drinks, no naps, no TV, no pacing the floor hands in pockets, but standing quiet and watchful.

“Sit down, Elgin.”

“Yes. sir.”

We sat down in two slave chairs. Elgin. I remember, was doing tourist spiels that summer and still wore his guide jacket with the Belle Isle coat of arms on the breast pocket, a livery which no house servant had ever worn but which by my grandfather’s calculation should satisfy the tourist’s need for proper NBC guide and authentic Southern butler rolled into one.

Elgin’s expression did not change. The only sign of his surprise was that though his face was turned slightly away, head cocked as if he were deaf, his eyes never left mine and had a wary hooded look.

“Elgin. I’m going to ask a favor of you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It is not difficult. The point is, I want you to do it without further explanation on my part. Would you?”

“Yes, sir,” said Elgin without a change of tone or blink of eye. “Even if it’s criminal or immoral”—slight smile now. “You know I’d do anything you axed.”

Elgin was a senior at M.I.T. and had what he thought were two reasons to be grateful to me, though I knew better than to rely on gratitude, a dubious state of mind if indeed there is such a thing. And in truth I had done very little for him, the kind of easy favors native liberals do and which are almost irresistible to the doer, if not to the done to, yielding as they do a return of benefit to one and a good feeling to the other all out of proportion to the effort expended. That was one of the pleasures of the sixties: it was so easy to do a little which seemed a lot. We basked in our own sense of virtue and in what we took to be their gratitude. Maybe that was why it didn’t last very long. Who can stand gratitude?

I helped him get a scholarship, which took very little doing what with the Ivy League beating the bushes for any black who could read without using his finger and what with Elgin graduating first in his class at St. Augustine and winning the state science fair with a project demonstrating electron spin which I never quite understood.

So Elgin was smart, Elgin was well educated. Elgin could read and write better than most whites. And yet. Yet Elgin still talks muffle-mouthed, says ax for ask, sa-urdy for Saturday, chirren for children.

He was a slim but well-set-up youth with mauve brown skin, a narrow intense face, a non-Afro close clip as high off his ears and up his neck as a Young Republican’s, and a lately acquired frowning finicky manner which irritated me a little just as it irritates me in a certain kind of scientist who does not know what he does not know and discredits more than he should. Elgin was one of them. It was as if he had sailed in a single jump from Louisiana pickaninny playing marbles under a chinaberry tree to a smart-ass M.I.T. senior, leapfrogging not only the entire South but all of history as well. And maybe he knew what he was doing. From cotton patch to quantum physics and glad not to have stopped along the way.

But he and his family had yet another reason to be grateful to me, a slightly bogus reason to be sure, which I in my own slightly bogus-liberal fashion was content not to have set straight. He thought I saved his family from the Klan. In a way I did. His father, Ellis, and mother, Suellen, our faithful and until recently ill-paid retainers, and his little brother. Fluker, had all been threatened by the local Kluxers because Ellis’s church (he was its part-time preacher) had served as a meeting place for CORE or Snick or one of those. They burned a cross, threatened to burn the church and come “get” the Buells. It is true I went to see the Grand Kleagle and the harassment stopped. The story which I never had quite the energy or desire to correct was that in the grand mythic Lamar tradition I had confronted the Kleagle in his den, “called him out” with some such Southern Western shoot-out ultimatum as “Now listen here, you son of a bitch. I don’t know which one of you is bothering Ellis but I’m holding you responsible and if one hair of a Buell head is harmed, I’m going to shoot your ass off for you,” and so forth and so forth. I put a stop to it all right, but in a manner more suited to Southern complexities and realities than the simple dreams of the sixties, when there were only good people and bad people. I went to see the Grand Kleagle all right, who was none other than J. B. Jenkins, a big dumb boy who played offensive tackle with me in both high school and college. He was as big and dumb and as good a tackle as can be, managing even to flunk out of a state school later, no small achievement in those days, and had ever since operated not a Gulf Oil service station but a Gulf Coast Oil service station. He was a good family man, believed in Jesus Christ, America, the Southern way of life, hated Communists and liberals, and was not altogether wrong on any count. At any rate, all I said to him in the sweltering galvanized tin shack of his Gulf Coast Oil station was: “Now, J.B., I want you to do me a favor.” “What’s that, Lance, old buddy?” “You know what I want. I want you to lay off Ellis and his church.” “Now, goddamn, Lance, you know as well as I do ain’t nothing but a bunch of Jew Communists out there stirring up the niggers.” “Will you take my word for something, J.B.?” “You know I will.” “I swear to you there’s no Jews or Communists out there and I will swear to you that Ellis is a good Godfearing Baptist like you and you have nothing to fear from him.” “Yeah, but he is one more uppity nigger.” “Yeah, but he’s my nigger, J.B. He’s been working for us for forty years and you know that.” “Well, that’s true. Well, all right. Lance. Don’t worry about nothing. Lets us have a drink.” So we had a drink of straight three-dollar whiskey in that 110-degree iron shack. Sweat sprang off our heads like halos. And that was that.

Ah well. Like I told you, real life is more complicated and ambiguous than in the movies. Ellis Buell was grateful. Ellis Buell had seen too much TV and Gunsmoke. “You should have seen Mr. Lance call that white trash out.” And so forth.

His son Elgin was a different matter. Actually Elgin was the only one who didn’t care much one way or the other about such matters. Like Archimedes he was more interested, exclusively interested, in writing out his formulae and would not have cared or even noticed whether it was a Kluxer or a Roman soldier who lifted his hand against him.

Elgin. I do believe, would do what I asked, not out of gratitude (a very bad emotion as both he and I knew), but because he liked me and felt sorry for me. Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life.

I had counted too on my request intriguing him as a kind of mathematical game, which it was. It did.

Did it ever occur to you that after we went to college we never touched each other? Do you remember walking down Bourbon Street behind two Russian sailors who were holding hands? Do you remember sleeping in a motel bed in Jackson, Mississippi, with a whore between us? Why was it all right for us to simultaneously assault the poor whore between us but never once touch each other? Who is crazy, we or the Russians?

Ah, you touch my shoulder. Do you know that I am embarrassed?

Oh, Christ, there is something wrong with my mind. I’ve drawn a blank again. It’s a little frightening. I could use a drink. Everybody talks about the horrors of drink, which are real enough, but not about its beauties. Your God gave us wine, didn’t he, and threw good parties? Half-drunk, I can remember everything, see everything as it is and was, the beauty in it rather than the sadness. I could remember everything we ever did. There was a lovely looseness then and a letting go and a magical transformation of those sad Southern afternoons into a garden of delights. Wasn’t there? We had a good time, you and I. Then youth ended and you left for God. I joined the A.C.L.U. and became a liberal. Then a drunk. Sober, I could not bear to look at Belle Isle and the great oaks; they seemed so sad and used up and self-canceling. Five good drinks and they seemed themselves.

It’s not that I can’t remember. It’s all there, what happened, spread out like a map, but I have trouble collecting my thoughts, focusing. Perhaps I remember too well like memorizing a speech, reciting it a dozen times before the mirror, then when the time comes to speak, you can’t come up with the first word.

Once my father told me he had a recurring waking nightmare. What if one should simply fail in what one set out to do in life, fail utterly, cannot remember the first word, have the first thought, carry out the simplest action, complete the simplest task? Like an actor forgetting his lines and bringing the whole play to an awful embarrassing halt. What if one should rise to address the jury and forget? (My father had a Harvard law degree but never practiced.) Secretly I believe he was afraid that of all the people on earth he alone would fail and the world would come to an end out of shame for him.

With such a fear, what happens to a man? Nothing. He didn’t, couldn’t, try anything for fear the world would come to an end if he failed. So he became editor of the second best of the two weekly newspapers in a country parish, suffered from “weak lungs” whatever that is, not tuberculosis but a “tendency” toward it, and was a semi-invalid, spending his days writing poems and little historical vignettes. The high point of his life came when he was elected Poet Laureate of Feliciana Parish by the Kiwanis Club.

Let me tell you the family secret which not even you know, though you know everything else. But do you know that I honestly believe that his wife, my mother, Lily, cuckolded him too? I remember Uncle Harry, also called Buster, a distant cousin of hers, a handsome beefy Schenley salesman, ex-Realsilk salesman, who was always in and out of Belle Isle when I was a child. No one was gladder to see him than I because he brought the most expensive toys, Erector sets, scout knives with twenty blades, and would throw me ten feet in the air — happiness! squeals! Children are more easily bribed than cocker spaniels. And there was my father reclining on a lounge chair under an afghan on the upper gallery looking down the oak alley and writing poems which were not as good as Longfellow’s Evangeline, which is bad enough, but like it, and gentle historical vignettes whenever he located another old “non-Roman” church. Uncle Harry would come roaring up in his Buick convertible and holler out: I’m taking everybody joyriding to False River. My father would insist that Mother go: she needed the air: Suellen can look after me, can’t you, Suellen? “Sho now, you go on ahead. Miss Lily, you ain’t been anywhere all summer.” And off they’d go, we’d go — I sometimes but not always—“joyriding.” Christ, joyriding! Jesus, do you really imagine that—? Of course the question is not why but why not. Ha ha, what a laugh in a way. Because we were such an honorable family. And of course here is the most intriguing question of all: Did my father know all along?

You look so unhappy. Who are you unhappy for? Me? Lily? My father? Sinful suffering humanity? Your own sunk melancholy family? Are you playing the priest now?

Elgin? Yes, you’re right. It was Elgin I was talking about. Yes. No. Wait. I did mention a map. It wasn’t a map. It was a floor plan. I remember. I gave Elgin the floor plan of the Holiday Inn which I had gotten that very afternoon from my Uncle Lock. Bushrod Laughlin Lamar, who operated it.

“Elgin, here is a floor plan of the Holiday Inn.”

“Yes, sir.” He took it. It could have been his pay check for all the reaction he showed. Does anything white people do ever surprise blacks?

“Here’s a problem where you might be able to help me. You don’t need to know the details. It is enough to say that I am concerned about my daughter Lucy, who is young and impressionable and may have gotten into some difficulties with drugs. But first I have to have the facts, beginning with where she goes, how she spends her time.”

Elgin squinted hard at the floor plan as if he expected to see Lucy.

“What I want you to do is this. I want you to register at the Holiday Inn for the next three nights and keep a log of her comings and goings. You know, the film crew is there, and she’s stagestruck and hangs around at all hours. In fact, make a complete record. Make a note of anyone you know: Merlin, Troy Dana, Janos Jacoby, Raine Robinette, even me and my wife. I want the whole picture. Do you understand?”

His single swift opaque look told me he did understand. Understood and agreed. Understood even that there was something I needed to know but didn’t want to tell him, nor did he want me to.

“Now here’s the problem. Think of it as a mathematical game. I want you to pick one of those rooms. I’ve fixed it up with Lock, you can have any room you want, he knows you’re in the film.”

Placing the floor plan on the plantation desk between us, I wrote names in empty rooms.

“The idea is to pick a room or any other vantage point which commands a view of the following: the inner door of the Oleander Room here — that’s where they view the rushes — Dana’s room here, Raine’s here, Merlin’s here, Jacoby’s here. Here’s the hitch (this should interest you — it baffles me): there would be no problem if the inner court were a simple quadrangle. You could simply sit at the window of nearly every room and see everything, even Merlin’s room, which is on the second story. All you would have to do is choose a room, say here on the first floor opposite. But as you see, it is not so simple. The court is L-shaped. So if you took this room, you could not see Raine’s room here. And if you took this room, you could see Raine’s room but not Merlin’s.”

“Mm.” Now Elgin was interested, transported from the inelegant mysteries of white folks’ doings to the elegant simplicities of geometry. Using his thumb, he began to push his lip over his eyetooth, a new mannerism. My guess is he got it from one of his M.I.T. professors.

“Take these binoculars, Elgin. They are excellent night glasses. Don’t forget your log. In your log make a note of everything you see: not only the exact time anyone enters or leaves a room, but anything else you happen to notice, what a person may carry with him, what they do, the smallest item of behavior.”

Elgin was busy drawing lines across the court, angles and declinations. He frowned happily. I repeated my instructions.

“You mean all night?”

“Yes. That is, from eleven to dawn. Or rather, just before dawn. I don’t want you to be seen.”

“For three nights?”

“Maybe. At the outside. We’ll see how it goes. You’re relieved as of now from guide duty. Go home and get some sleep. I’ll tell Ellis that I’m sending you to New Orleans to take a deposition.”

“I wonder what this room is. Probably the alcove for Coke machine and ice maker.”

“Probably. No window.”

Elgin took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “You see, here’s what it comes to.” I could see him twenty years later, for his expression, his mannerisms had already begun to set; see him behind his desk, give himself to a problem, quickly take off his glasses and rub his eyes. “The problem as you pose it is insoluble — unless you want to rig up a system of mirrors, bore holes in floors, which I gather you don’t.”

“I don’t.”

“You see, if I were in 214, an upper room near the inner corner of the ell, I could see every room but Raine’s on the first floor. On the other hand, if I were across the court near the outer corner of the ell, I couldn’t see Merlin’s room.” More lines, lines crossing lines like electrons colliding.

“To see all rooms, posing the problem as you do, you’d need two observers. Me here and, say, Fluker here.”

“Fluker! He’d go to sleep!”

We both laughed. The very name was funny for us, a secret joke.

Elgin smiled his old smile, his sweet white-flashing un-mannered smile. “He sho would. Hm. Let’s see. Let’s-us-see.” He gazed at the plan and tapped his pencil. Why did I feel like the student visiting the professor? “We-ull!” (How happy scientists are! Why didn’t we become scientists, Percival? They confront problems which can be solved. We don’t know what we confront. Does it have a name?)

Elgin put on his glasses. “The pool is here?”

“Right.”

“Is it lit?”

“By underwater lights after ten. The floodlights are fixed to the balconies but the area around the pool is fairly dark.”

“Lounges and chairs around here?”

“Yes.”

“Scrubs — that is, shrubbery around here?”

“Yes.” Ellis, his father, used to say scrubs for shrubs: “You want me to cut them scrubs?” Not even Ellis says that any more.

“Then there’s only one place.” Elgin dropped his pencil with a clatter, picked it up. made a big X, dropped it again, sat back. He smiled. His eyelids lowered. He’d made a breakthrough!

“The middle of the court?”

“Sure. Where else?”

“But—”

“What kind of lounge chairs they got?”

“What kind?”

“I mean light aluminum or those heavy wooden ones?”

“Redwood, heavy, black webbing. Too heavy to steal, I remember. Lock is proud of them.”

Again Elgin smiled his old brilliant sweet smile. In his triumph he permitted himself to be what he was: a twenty-two-year-old Southern youth who smiled and laughed a great deal. “It’s dark here you say. The lounges are dark, the webbing is black. I’ll wear black swim trunks and man can’t nobody see nothing.”

I smiled. He wasn’t even burlesquing himself as black or Southern black but as TV-Hollywood-Sammy-Davis-Junior black and he knew that I knew it.

He snapped his fingers. “No. It’s even better than that.”

“How?”

“Don’t you see? It wouldn’t matter if anyone saw me at that distance. A man in trunks by the pool. Nobody would pay the slightest attention. Like Poe’s Purloined Letter.”

Poe’s Purloined Letter. I thought about J. B. Jenkins, bad man, good man, bad good man, Kluxer, Christian, tackle, and comrade at arms against Alabama’s mighty Crimson Tide. The only Poe he knew was Alcide “Coonass” Poe, tailback from De Ridder. J. B. and I, sunk in life, soaked in old Louisiana blood and tears and three hundred years of Christian sin and broadsword Bowie-knife Sharps-rifle bloodshed and victory-defeat. And Elgin leapfrogging us all, transformed overnight into snotty-cool Yankee professor.

Poe’s Purloined Letter indeed. Poe. He too had got onto Elgin’s secret: Find happiness in problems and puzzles and mathematical gold bugs. But he let go of it. Went nutty like me. Elgin wouldn’t.

“How are you going to get the binoculars out there?”

“Wrapped in my towel.”

“Okay. Then the location of the room doesn’t matter. Go on out there now and register. Keep your log tonight. When you get back, get some sleep and meet me here about this time tomorrow. I’ll put Fluker on guide duty.”

“Fluker.” Again we laughed. “No telling what Fluker gon say.”

“He’ll do fine. Anyhow, what difference does it make?”

“Yeah.” Elgin was casting ahead again. “How to see to write in the dark is the thing. White pencil on black? Pencil light? No, what I’m going to use”—clearly he was talking to himself—“is a Kiefer blacklight stylus.”

“You do that.”

JACOBY? I HAVEN’T TOLD you about him? The headlines? BELLE ISLE BURNS! DIRECTOR MURDERED AND MUTILATED! EX-GRID STAR HELD FOR QUESTIONING! Yes, I remember all that. Belle Isle burned to the ground except for twenty snaggle-toothed Doric columns. My hands burned trying to save Margot.

It is difficult to think about all that.

You must believe me when I tell you that it is the banality of the past which puts me off. There is only one reason I am telling you about these old sad things, or rather trying to remember them, and it has nothing to do with not being able to remember. I can remember. I can remember every word Elgin said to me in the pigeonnier. It is because the past, any past, is intolerable, not because it is violent or terrible or doomstruck or any such thing, but just because it is so goddamn banal and feckless and useless. And violence is the most banal and boring of all. It is horrible not because it is bloody but because it is meaningless. It does not signify.

Then why bother to tell you? Because something is bothering me and I won’t know what it is until I say it. Presently I’m going to ask you a question. Not that you will be able to answer it. But it is important that I ask it. That was always the best thing about you, that you were the only person I could ever talk to.

Why did you leave twenty years ago? Wasn’t Louisiana good enough for you? Do you think the U.S.A. needs you less than Biafra? I sometimes think that if you’d been around to talk to…

You are silent. Christ, you don’t know yourself.

I have to tell you what happened in my own way — so I can know what happened. I won’t know for sure until I say it. And there is only one way I can endure the horrible banality of it: and that is that I sense there is a clue I’ve missed and that you might pick it up.

It is as if I knew that the clue was buried somewhere in the rubble of Belle Isle and that I have to spend days kicking through the ashes to find it. I couldn’t do that alone. But we could do it.

A clue to what? To the “mystery” of Belle Isle? No. To hell with that. Belle Isle is gone and I couldn’t care less. If it were intact it would be the last place on earth I’d choose to live. I’d rather live in Brooklyn. As gone with the wind as Tara and as good riddance.

No, that’s not the mystery. The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time.

Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes?

Because there is a clue in the past.

Start with the present moment. Look out there. A fall afternoon in New Orleans with the peculiar gold light that fills the sky when the first wedge of Canadian cold air slides like a crystal prism under the Gulf steambath. Look at the gold light. It radiates in the crystal and filters down into the same shabby streets with the same neighborhood sounds of housewives switching on their Hoovers, TV, voices through kitchen doorways, the same smell of the Tchoupitoulas docks.

Consider the past. Imagine a man sitting in Feliciana Parish for twenty years practicing law (yes! “practicing”), playing at being a “moderate” or “liberal” whatever that is, all under the illusion that he was living his life and was not even aware that he was not.

But something happens. There is a difference. The difference between then and now is that now I’ve been alerted. I am aware of being the tape head. I am aware of this room being a tape head. That is why it is so simple and empty: so I can be aware. As you can see, it consists of nothing but a small empty space with time running through it and a single tiny opening on the world. I’m staying here until I can decide what the tape head is doing and whether I have anything to say about it. It is simply a devourer of time and does it necessarily turn the pure empty future into the shabby past?

A year ago (was it a year?) I made my two great discoveries: one, Margot’s infidelity; two, my freedom. I can’t tell you why, but the second followed directly upon the first. The moment I knew for a fact that Margot had been fucked by another man, it was as if I had been waked from a twenty-year dream. I was Rip van Winkle rubbing his eyes. In an instant I became sober, alert, watchful. I could act.

Yet something went wrong. I am glad you are simply listening, looking at me and saying nothing. Because I was afraid you might suggest either that I had done nothing wrong — like the psychologist here: no matter what I tell him, even if I break wind, he gives me the same quick congratulatory look — either that I had done nothing wrong or that I had “sinned”—and I don’t know which is worse. Because it isn’t that. I don’t know what that means. Yet obviously something went wrong, because here I am, in a nuthouse — or is it a prison? — recovering from shock, psychosis, disorientation.

From a state of freedom and the ability to act (that night I told you about, the world was open! I was free! I could do anything, devise any plan), I now find myself closeted in a single small cell and glad to be here.

A fox doesn’t crawl into a hole for a year unless he is wounded. But after a while he begins to feel good, pokes his nose out, takes a look around.

I still have the resolve to make a new life, an absolutely new beginning. But I know that one must start from scratch.

Begin with a burrow, a small clean well-swept place such as this, with one tiny window on the world and another creature in the next room. That is all you need. In fact, that is all you can stand. Add more creatures, more world, books, talk, TV, news — and we’ll all be as crazy as we were before. There is too much feeding into the tape head — the new tape is too empty — too many possibilities — but the recorded tape is too full.

But what went wrong with the other new life last year? I must find out so I won’t make the same mistake twice. Therefore I must go back and kick through the ashes of Belle Isle. There is something I don’t understand. And you are both my leverage point and my companion. Because you knew Belle Isle and you know me and I can’t tell anyone else.

In a month or so I shall be leaving here. At least that is my opinion, even though the doctors have not committed themselves. Perhaps Anna will be well enough to leave too.

Who is Anna? The woman next door. I didn’t tell you I had paid her a visit and she told me her name? She also ate something for the first time. Soon they won’t have to force feed her. How did that happen? Very simple. I just got tired of all that wall tapping. Yesterday I simply got up, went to my door, opened it, and went out in the hall — the first time I had ever done so voluntarily — and walked ten feet and there was her door. I knocked on it and went in. (Sometimes life is simple!) She was lying on her cot as usual, curled up, face to the wall, a tangle of hair on her cheek, thin hip upthrust in her hospital gown. Her brown boylike arms made a perfect V, hands pressed palms together between her thighs.

I stood looking down at her. She stirred.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Anna,” she said. That was all she said.

I decided to sit beside her. She stirred again, tucking her chin in her throat so she could see me past her cheekbone. I could see the gleam between her eyelids.

Her thin brown face reminded me of Lucy, except she didn’t have Lucy’s funny quirky expression and the tiny scar on her lip. Her face was blank, lips slightly parted and dry, like a woman asleep. She had a scar all right, not like Lucy’s, but a big white raised scar curving from forehead to cheek where she had been cut in the rape and beating. Her scar was like a whore’s. Do you remember our both making the observation that all whores have scars, belly scars from hysterectomies and abortions, face scars from beatings, leg scars from car wrecks?

“Here,” I told her. “Eat this.” In my pocket I had half a dozen Hershey kisses Malcolm (the guard — or is he a nurse?) had given me. I unwrapped the silver foil of one and offered it to her. She made no response. I put it into her mouth.

Do you know what she did?

She raised one hand from between her thighs, took the candy out, tucked her chin again, frowned, and looked at it exactly the way a child would, then closed her eyes, put it back in her mouth, and began sucking it.

Yes. Jacoby. He was there, I think, the night of the day I talked to Elgin. At any rate, there was one night I remember.

Janos Jacoby was full of himself. Youngish, short, black forelock which he kept whipping off his eyes with a toss of his head. He was either volatile fiery French-Polish or he knew how to act volatile fiery French-Polish or maybe both. Maybe he was from the Bronx. His accent varied — he had been an actor too and so didn’t know what he was. Sitting next to Margot, he gave all his attention to her, turning so far around in his chair that, his back to me, he was almost facing her. He had also gotten onto the foreigner’s knack of using his accent and even his mistakes to his advantage. Searching for a word, lips tensed European style, he would hold both hands under Margot’s face as if the word were there for both to examine. Though he ignored Raine and Dana — I wondered if all directors ignored all actors — he used his head, face, hands, lips like an actor, for an effect. An effect on Margot. She was charmed. Her eyes sparkled. Color rose in her cheeks. Her freckles darkened. His eyes swept past me, through me, as if I weren’t there. When she spoke, her shoulder swayed jokingly toward him. touching him.

Merlin, on the other side of Margot, seemed inattentive and bored. Using his spoon handle, he made long straight marks in the tablecloth. Once in a while Margot would sway the other way and touch him as if to draw him into the conversation, but he only nodded.

Earlier Merlin and Jacoby had been in an argument, Merlin talking about the indispensability of action and story in a film. Jacoby talking in a much fancier way about “cinematographic language,” “the semiotics of film,” “Griffith as master of denotative language.” “Metz as the only critic who understands the connotative film,” and so forth. What junk. I refused to pay attention.

Merlin finally shrugged and fell silent. I couldn’t tell whether Jacoby was trying to (1) upstage Merlin, (2) impress Margot, (3) do both, or (4) was speaking honestly.

Nor could I be sure whether Merlin was withdrawn because (1) Jacoby was paying too much attention to Margot, (2) he was bored by Jacoby’s fancy “cinematographic semiotics.”

Raine and Dana listened glumly. My daughter Lucy had managed to get herself between them and was in a transport of happiness, happy to be next to Troy Dana, whom she said she was in love with, but maybe even happier to be next to Raine, whom she worshipped as the casual possessor of those qualities most prized by Lucy and therefore, it seemed to her, most unattainable: beauty, fame, and that special “niceness” which Lucy could scarcely believe, Raine’s way of remembering the film crews’ names, the film crews’ wives’ names, servants’ names, and even the servants’ children’s names, taking time with her, Lucy’s friends. Raine’s ability to “act like anybody else, a real person” seemed to Lucy to surpass the most miraculous deeds of the saints. “She is the most wonderful person I have ever known,” Lucy told me.

I didn’t think Raine was wonderful. She was amazingly pretty, with a pure heart-shaped face and violet-cobalt eyes which seemed to look from her depths into yours, a trick I came to learn, that steady violet gaze, chin resting on the back of her bent hand. Her depths were vacant. But she flirted with me and that was pleasant. Her single enthusiasm, beside her niceness, was her absorption with a California cult called I.P.D., or something like that — Ideo-Personal-Dynamics maybe. She told me of it at length. I remember very little except that she said it was more scientific than astrology, being based not merely on the influence of the stars but on evidence of magnetic fields surrounding people. The existence of these fields or auras had been proved, she said, by special photography.

Cobalt eyes gazing straight into mine one foot away: “Did you know your magnetic field is as unique as your fingerprints?”

“No.”

“It is more exact than astrology because though we are both Capricorns, we are different.”

“Yes?”

“Many people are skeptical of astrology but there is scientific proof of this.”

“I understand.”

“Don’t you see the possibilities?”

“Possibilities?”

“For the future, for mankind, for preventing wars.”

“How’s that?”

“Everyone could have his ideogram, which is a scientific reading of his magnetic field. Some ideograms are clearly stronger than others or incompatible with others. If the President of the United States has a weak ideogram, it would be stupid to send him to a summit meeting. It’s the ultimate weapon against Communism.”

“I can see how it would be.”

The actors, I noticed, took a light passing interest in everything, current events, Scientology, politics. They were hardly here at all, in Louisiana that is, but were blown about this way and that, like puffballs, in and out of their roles, “into” Christian Science, back out again.

“I find it a tremendous help in both my personal and professional life. Wouldn’t you like to have a reading? You know. I think you underrate yourself.” She said it all in a single breath.

“Well, no, that is, yes, sure. Will you give me a reading?”

“Will I ever give you a reading!”

The trouble was that even when she was on this, her favorite subject, her voice went flat and trailed off. Her eyes were steady but unfocused. I had the feeling she wasn’t listening to herself. Could it be that her I.P.D. was a trick too, not a trick she played on me but on herself, a way of filling up time?

Merlin and Jacoby argued about the movies they were making, or rather Jacoby seemed to be making, because although Merlin was the producer-director and Jacoby co-director, it was Jacoby who ran the set, yelling at actors and grips, even ordering local residents out of their own houses. It amazed me how meekly, even joyfully, the locals received these bad manners. Anything to be in a movie, or somehow connected with a movie. Then I thought: Listen who’s talking and who’s been kicked out of his own house.

They were arguing about the scene where the poor white sharecropper rapes the aristocratic girl in the loft of the pigeonnier.

“Of course you must realize”—said Jacoby, leaning over Margot, drawling and moving his lips muscularly—“that at this point something very important happens, Bob. Because what starts out to be a rape, an act of violence which comes from his own — how do you say, being caught—”

“Trapped,” said Margot, pulling back slightly from Jacoby’s face.

“Yes! Trapped by being a sharecropper and so hitting out at those people, his—”

“Oppressors.”

“Right! But a moment occurs when all this disappears and the girl through her own femaleness, feminineness, what? turns this moment into something else, that is, a man and a woman—”

“Don’t you mean, Jan,” said Margot, her eyes glowing, “that the girl with her own gift for tenderness and caring converts a moment of violence into a moment of love? Isn’t it a transformation of a political act by an erotic act?”

“Oh, Margot, you are right!” She made him happy. “Exactly. It is a transforming of the political into the erotic.”

Merlin roused slightly. “It is true, I agree. Margot speaks of love. Very well. Love is great. Love conquers all. But here we are content with the erotic — this pair hardly know each other. But the point is that violence, rape or murder, or whatever, is always death-dealing whereas the erotic, in any form at all, is always life-enhancing.”

“Yes! That’s the nice swing, what you say, switch, don’t you see, Margot?” Jacoby turned his black eyes on her. “It is the aristocrat in this case who has the life-enhancing principle and not the sharecropper, as is usually the case, since he is usually shown as coming from the dirt.”

“Soil,” said Margot.

Was he from the Bronx or Brno?

“Yes, and even though she comes from racism, which is equally death-dealing since it is geno—”

“Genocidal. Since a whole race is involved.”

When Janos searched for a word, his eyes roamed past me, through me, to the dark corners of the room. I felt like an actor.

“And the sharecropper is always wavering between the two, the life and death principle. The girl guides him toward life through the erotic. She is his Beatrice.” Bay-ah-tree-chay.

What irritated me was that despite myself I wanted to be noticed by Janos Jacoby — why for God’s sake? for Margot’s sake? and found myself trying to think of something impressive like “cinematographic semiotics.” But when his eyes swept past me, through me, for the fifth time, I gave it up and decided to satisfy my own curiosity.

So I asked him: “What about the scene between the sheriff and the black sharecropper’s daughter?”

“Eh?” Jacoby swung around as if to locate the origin of this unfamiliar voice. “Ah. I am not sure I know what you mean, ah — what about it?” I swear I don’t think he knew my name.

“Well, he is both erotic and racist and therefore both life-enhancing and death-dealing. Having had intercourse with her, which was by no means rape, where does that leave him, canceled out so to speak, half bad half good, back at zero?”

Silence. Jacoby and Merlin looked at each other. Margot, between them, blushed. Was she blushing for me?

Jacoby sighed and shook his head. Merlin undertook to explain. “Wouldn’t you agree, Lance, that there is such a thing as a sexist violent eroticism which is quite as exploitative as rape itself?”

“No. I don’t understand that.”

Again silence. Eyes averted. It was as if there was a turd, somehow mine, on the snowy tablecloth between us.

“Darling, what you don’t realize,” said Margot, blushing and taking my hand across the table, “is that the sheriff is performing an out-and-out sexist act of aggression and treats the black girl as a sex object.”

“I see.” I was looking at Ellis Buell, who was passing the crawfish étouffé. His eyes caught mine. But they were shuttered and did not signify.

After supper I paid my usual visit to Tex and Siobhan. They were in the library on the third floor where my father used to keep his books of Romantic English poetry, Southern history, Robert E. Lee biographies (Robert E. Lee was his saint; he loved him the way Catholics love St. Francis. If the South were Catholic, we’d have long since had an order of St. Robert E. Lee, a stern military Christian order like the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel — hell, I’m not sure we don’t), Louisiana history, Feliciana Parish history, Episcopal Church history, the Waverley novels, Jean Christophe, Saint-Exupéry, Admiral Byrd’s Alone, H. G. Wells’s The Science of Life, the Life of James Bowie—a strange collection in which I could detect no common denominator except a taste for the extraordinary and marvelous, the sentimental, the extraordinary experience, the extraordinary adventure undertaken by a brave few, the extraordinary life of genius, the extraordinary stunt of H. G. Wells in taking on all of life, the extraordinary glory of a lost cause which becomes more extraordinary as it recedes in time and in fact Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia had long since become for him as legendary and mythical as King Arthur and the Round Table. Do you think I was named Lancelot for nothing? The Andrewes was tacked on by him to give it Episcopal sanction, but what he really had in mind and in his heart wanted to be and couldn’t have been more different from was that old nonexistent Catholic brawler and adulterer, Lancelot du Lac, King Ban of Benwick’s son, knight of the Round Table and — here was the part he could never get over — one of only two knights to see the Grail (you, Percival, the other); and above all the extraordinariness of those chaste and incorrupt little Anglican chapels set down in this violent and corrupt land besieged on all sides by savage Indians, superstitious Romans, mealy-mouthed Baptists, howling Holy Rollers.

Siobhan was cross and nervous. She was a bright thin wiry perfect little blonde(!), her beauty spoiled only by clouded eyes and a petulant expression.

Tex fancied they were close, that she couldn’t get along with her mother, that he had saved her from the niggers. Actually he got on her nerves and she’d have been better off with the niggers. He had a fond insistent yet inattentive way with her which parodied affection and didn’t fool her. Indeed, it was as if he were out to irritate her.

She ran to give me a hug and a kiss. I hugged and kissed her back, feeling her thin little bones in her grownup full-length nylon nightgown. She hugged me too hard, making her arms tremble; her clouded blue eyes didn’t quite focus on me. She had learned Tex’s trick of parody. They had been watching a cartoon on TV. “What do you think of that cute little fawn?” he asked several times in his mindless singsong, reaching out for her. He too liked to feel her little bones. At seven she was as sexual a creature as her mother but in a dim clouded approximation of it, as if she had forgotten something or was about to remember it. She could curve her lips richly but her eyes were as opaque as a doll’s. She liked to show her body and would sit, dress pulled up, arms clasping knees, her little biscuit showing.

Did I love Margot? I’m not sure what you mean, what that word means, but it was good between us. The best times were the sudden unprovided times: leaving the office at ten o’clock, three o’clock, any time at all, going home to Belle Isle to pick her up, snatching her out over protests from her restorations, her as sweaty and plaster-powdered as the workmen restoring Belle Isle to a splendor it had never known; she frowning and fussing and reluctant at first, even then torn a little between me and Belle Isle. In the end we both lost out, the house and I, but she happy as I to be in the old Buick convertible beside me, top down, headed anywhere and nowhere, maybe up the Natchez Trace, singing through dark and bright, the perpetual twilight of the deep loess cuts smelling of earth, and out into the little bright meadows and the pine-winey sunlight, the singing cicadas keeping up with us like the Buick’s shadow, she as close as close not forbearing to kiss my neck and cheek over and over again, my hand between her thighs, the radio playing Country Western, which she really liked, hell-bent though she was not to miss a single New Orleans symphony concert; cutoff on a cowpath and sit in the grass, the whiskey and Seven-Up between us, Kristofferson singing and she forgetting Ludwig Beethoven and singing too.

Freedom’s just another word. Lord, for nothing left to lose

Nothing ain’t worth nothing, Lord, but it’s free

Feeling good was easy, Lord, when Bobby sang the blues

Feeling good was good enough for me

Good enough for me and Bobby McGee.

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.

I think I see now what I am doing. I am reliving with you my quest. That’s the only way I can bear to think about it. Something went wrong. If you listen I think I can figure out what it was.

It was a quest all right and a very peculiar one. But peculiar times require peculiar quests.

We’ve spoken of the Knights of the Holy Grail. Percival. Do you know what I was? The Knight of the Unholy Grail.

In times like these when everyone is wonderful, what is needed is a quest for evil.

You should be interested! Such a quest serves God’s cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God. If you had ten thousand Albert Schweitzers giving their lives for their fellow men, do you think anyone would have a second thought about God?

Or suppose the Lowell Professor of Religion at Harvard should actually find the Holy Grail, dig it up in an Israeli wadi, properly authenticate it, carbon date it, and present it to the Metropolitan Museum. Millions of visitors! I would be as curious as the next person and would stand in line for hours to see it. But what difference would it make in the end? People would be interested for a while, yes. This is an age of interest.

But suppose you could show me one “sin,” one pure act of malevolence. A different cup of tea! That would bring matters to a screeching halt. But we have plenty of evil around you say. What about Hitler, the gas ovens and so forth? What about them? As everyone knows and says, Hitler was a madman. And it seems nobody else was responsible. Everyone was following orders. It is even possible that there was no such order, that it was all a bureaucratic mistake.

Show me a single “sin.”

One hundred and twenty thousand dead at Hiroshima? Where was the evil of that? Was Harry Truman evil? As for the pilot and bombardier, they were by all accounts wonderful fellows, good fathers and family men.

“Evil” is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone’s either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil.

God may be absent, but what if one should find the devil? Do you think I wouldn’t be pleased to meet the devil? Ha, ha. I’d shake his hand like a long-lost friend.

The mark of the age is that terrible things happen but there is no “evil” involved. People are either crazy, miserable, or wonderful, so where does the “evil” come in?

There I was forty-five years old and I didn’t know whether there was “evil” in the world.

A small corollary to the above: Is evil to be sought in violence or in sexual behavior? Or is all violence bad and all sexual behavior good, or as Jacoby and Merlin would say, life-enhancing?

If one is looking for evil, why not study war or child-battering? Could anything be more evil? Yet, as everyone knows, mothers and fathers who beat and kill their children have psychological problems and are as bad off as the children. It has been proved that every battered child has battered parents, battered grandparents, and so on. No one is to blame.

As for war, the only time members of my family have ever been happy, brave, successful, was in time of war. What’s wrong with war?

Look across the street. Do you see that girl’s Volkswagen’s bumper sticker: Make Love Not War. That is certainly the motto of the age. Is anything wrong with it?

Yes. Could it be possible that since the greatest good is to be found in love, so is the greatest evil. Evil, sin, if it exists, must be incommensurate with anything else. Didn’t one of your saints say that the entire universe in all its goodness is not worth the cost of a single sin? Sin is incommensurate, right? There is only one kind of behavior which is incommensurate with anything whatever, in both its infinite good and its infinite evil. That is sexual behavior. The orgasm is the only earthly infinity. Therefore it is either an infinite good or an infinite evil.

My quest was for a true sin — was there such a thing? Sexual sin was the unholy grail I sought.

It is possible of course that there is no such thing and that a true sin, like the Grail, probably does not exist.

Yet I had the feeling I was on to something, perhaps for the first time in my life. Or at least for twenty years. I was like Robinson Crusoe seeing a footprint on his island after twenty years: Not a footprint but my daughter’s blood type. Aha, there is something going on!

So overnight I became sober, clear-eyed, clean, fit, alert, watchful as a tiger at a water hole.

Something was stirring. So Sir Lancelot set out, looking for something rarer than the Grail. A sin.

“Elgin, how would you like to make a movie?”

Elgin smiled. “Merlin axed me already.”

“To be in one. I’m asking about making a movie, not Merlin’s. Mine. I’m going to make a movie.”

“You are?”

“And you’re going to help me.”

“I am?”

“Elgin, listen.” I walked around the plantation desk and stood hands in pockets looking down at him. He sat perfectly symmetrical, arms resting at an angle across chair arms, fingers laced, gazing straight ahead, a slight smile on his lips. “I’m asking a favor of you. I need someone to help me and only you can do it. There are two reasons for this. One is that only you have the technical ability to help me. The other is that you are one of the two or three people in the world I trust. The others are probably your mother and father. I must tell you that it is a large favor because you will be doing it without knowing why. Although what I’m asking you to do is not illegal, it is just as well you don’t know the reasons. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“Okay.” Still avoiding my eye, he answered immediately. It was as if he already knew what I wanted.

“Here’s the technical problem. To tell you the truth, I don’t know whether it can be solved. Certainly I have no idea of how to go about it.” I took out my floor plan of Belle Isle’s second story. “You see these five rooms? Margot’s and Raine’s on one side of the hall, separated by the chimney and dumb-waiter. On the other side of the hall are these three rooms, Troy Dana’s here. Merlin’s here, Janos Jacoby’s here. They’ll be moving back to the house tomorrow as I had anticipated.”

Elgin’s eyelids flickered once, when I mentioned Margot’s name. Otherwise his expression did not change.

Elgin didn’t move, but his eyes went out of focus.

“Now here’s what I want. I want a hidden camera mounted in each room and the events which occur in the room between midnight and five o’clock recorded. For one, perhaps two nights. Three nights at the most.”

“No way,” he said at last.

But even as he said it, shaking his head and smiling, he was casting about in his mind — happily. Happy the man who can live with problems! It was this I had counted on of course, that the problem, its sheer impossibility, would engage him immediately so that he would not think two seconds about what I was asking him to do.

Even as he smiled and shook his head, he was casting about. It was the challenge of the thing. He was like a mountain climber, pitoned, rappeled, looking straight up a sheer cliff. It couldn’t be climbed. On the other hand, perhaps—

“No way.” He repeated the impossibility, savored it.

“Why not?”

“At least three reasons. Not enough light. Camera noise. And no camera will run five hours.”

“I see.” I waited, watching him thumb his glasses up his nose bridge, scratch his head.

An odd thought: I remember thinking at the time that nothing really changes, not even Elgin going from pickaninny to M.I.T. smart boy. For you see, even in doing that and not in casting about for the technical solution, he was still in a sense “my nigger”; and my watching him, waiting for him, was piece and part of the old way we had of ascribing wondrous powers to “them,” if they were “ours.” Don’t you remember how my grandfather used to say of old Fluker, Ellis’s father, that with Fluker along on a quail hunt you didn’t need bird dogs, that Fluker knew where the birds were?

That was part of it sure enough — not that Elgin was like a bird dog but that in being smart and through some special dispensation, perhaps by reason of our very need and helplessness, we could depend on them for anything, not just to smell out quail, but to be M.I.T. smart, smarter than we, Jew-smart, no, smarter than Jews. I could hear my grandfather: I’ll put that Elgin up against a Jew anytime, any Jew. Go pick your Jew.

“Does it have to be a film?” Elgin looked up at me; his tongue went sideways. I knew he had thought of something.

“What else—”

“How about a tape?”

“I want sight not sound.”

“Videotape.”

“How does that work?”

“Just like the closed-circuit TV camera you see in stores. Only—”

“Only?”

“Okay, look. How about this?” He swung round to the desk, picked up my pencil. His black eyes danced. It had come to him, the solution! “We use five mini-compact cameras here and here.” He put X’s in the dumbwaiter outlets to Margot’s and Raine’s rooms.

“I thought of that. But what about the three across the hall?”

“We’ll use the A/C vents.”

“The air conditioning?”

“Sure. We’ll use mini-compacts with twenty-five millimeter lenses — small enough to see through a slot in the grill.”

“What about camera noise?”

“No noise. No film. It’s a TV camera.”

“What about the dark?”

“We’ll use a Vidicon pickup tube, a Philips two-stage light intensifier — you know, it works on the fiber-optics principle, can pick up a single quantum of light.”

“Then we’ll need some light.”

“Moonlight will help.”

I looked at my feed-store calendar. “There’s a half moon.”

He picked up his glasses. “I might use infrared.”

“Good.”

“All I need is a control room. That could be anywhere.”

“How about my father’s library, here?”

“Don’t Mr. Tex and Siobhan use that? We have to have a completely undisturbed place.”

“All I have to do is move the TV set. I’ll put it in Siobhan’s room here.”

“That’s fine. I could bring in lead-in cables from the dumbwaiter and the A/C ducts by way of the third floor.”

“And what will you be doing in there?”

“Recording five tapes. I’ll need a Conrac monitor.”

“How long will it take you to rig up all that?”

“Well, I’ll have to go to New Orleans to get the equipment.” He looked at his watch. “Tomorrow. Then it would take the next day to rig it — if nobody was around.”

“They won’t be. They’re shooting in town the next two days. A courthouse scene and a love scene at the library.”

“Okay. I guess the best we can do is day-after-tomorrow night — and that’s only if everything goes well and I can get the equipment. But I’m sure I can get it.”

“I hope so. Because they’ll be shooting at Belle Isle in two or three days. Then it will be too late.”

“We can do it. All you got to do is clear the house tomorrow and the day after and clear the library at night.”

“How much will all that stuff cost?”

“The light intensifier is expensive, maybe four thousand. The whole works shouldn’t run over eight or ten at the outside.”

“Ten thousand,” I said. “I have that in the house account. I think I’d better get cash for you. The bank opens at nine. You could be on your way by nine-thirty.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Then what will you end up with?”

“Five tapes. Something like this.” He picked up an eight-track cartridge of Beethoven’s last quartets. During the last months I found that I could be moderately happy if I simultaneously (1) drank, (2) read Raymond Chandler, and (3) listened to Beethoven.

“There’s only one problem,” said Elgin, turning the tape over and over.

“What’s that?”

“Time. Not even this will record five hours. Ah.” He had it, the solution. For him now in a kind of exaltation of inventiveness, it was enough to put the problem into words. Saying it was solving it. He even snapped his fingers.

“We’ll have to use the new Subiru motion activator.”

“What is that?” In the very offhandedness of his voice I could catch the excitement, the exhilaration of his knowledge and skill.

He shrugged. “You know, the voice-activated sound tape recorder? It only goes on when there is a noise.”

“Like the President had?”

“Yeah.” He was too happy to notice irony. “Same principle. Transferred to light. The tape only moves when something or someone in front of the camera moves.”

“Something or someone. You mean it wouldn’t just record a sleeping person?”

“Only when he or she turned over. All he got to do is move — or talk.”

When something or someone moved. Yes, that was it. That was what I wanted. Who moved, toward whom, with whom.

It was necessary to visit the set, something I never did, in order to see how long the shooting would take and to warn Elgin should my houseguests decide to return to Belle Isle early. He must have time to arrange his own “set,” place and wire his cameras.

I needn’t have worried. They spent all day on one short scene between Margot and Dana. Fifteen or twenty times he had her up against the library stacks performing “simulated intercourse.” He was filmed from the rear doing something to Margot quickly and easily. He was clothed.

Merlin was surprised to see me, but pleasant and talkative as usual. I told him I had come to make him welcome at Belle Isle and to be sure they had removed from the motel. Though the danger from the hurricane was slight, the motel was built in a swamp and could be flooded.

“You’re a beautiful guy!” Merlin came close and took my arm. He had a way of making any encounter between us exclude the others. His blue eyes were fond; the white fiber made the iris spin with dizzy affection. “How extraordinary that a real hurricane should be approaching the same time as our make-believe hurricane. Actually though, this scene has nothing to do with the hurricane.”

“I want to hear the zipper,” Janos Jacoby told Dana.

The set was the small public library in town. Town folk watched, standing, arms folded, sitting on aluminum chairs, on the sidewalk, on the grass, in the doorway. Inside, the library was a mess; it looked as if the hurricane had already hit, everything moved out of the way to shoot Margot and Dana in the stacks. The blue-white lights were brighter and hotter than the sun outside. Heavy cables snaked over the trodden grass like a carnival ground. Between shots Dana zipped his pants, fell back, and cleaned his nails, listened inattentively to Jacoby. As the librarian in the movie, Margot wore glasses around her neck, white blouse, cashmere cardigan, sleeves pushed up. She was not at ease. Her face was cheeky and her movements wooden. She was. I saw instantly, not a good actress. What she was doing was not acting, that is, imitating someone else, but acting like an actress imitating-someone-else. She was once removed from acting.

Dana was something to see: barefoot, tight jeans with silver conch belt, some kind of pullover homespun shirt, necklace with single jade stone, perfect helmet of yellow hair, perfect regular features, perfect straight brows flaring like wings. He moved well and had grace. He was an idiot but he had grace. He was a blank space filled in by somebody else’s idea. He was a good actor. His eyes had somehow been made up so they seemed to gather light and glow of themselves. The town folk gaped at him as if he were another species. Perhaps he was. Perhaps somewhere on the golden sands of California had come into being a new breed of perfect creatures, young and golden.

Margot couldn’t see me. The lights were too bright.

“This is a very short scene but a very critical one,” Merlin explained. “It is the sexual liberation of Sarah.”

“Sexual liberation?”

“Yeah. You remember. Dana is the stranger who wanders into town from nowhere and is so extraordinarily gifted — everyone is immediately aware of it. Thank God for the movies. Dana gifted? He barely had sense not to drown when he fell off his surfboard in Beach Blanket Bingo. But look at him, isn’t he something? We can create him from the beginning like a doll. I created Dana — Dana himself is nothing, a perfect cipher. This character, this stranger is immediately perceived by everybody as somehow different — for one thing his eyes, there’s an inner light, he’s a creature of light. Look at him. His normal temperature is around 101. He actually glows. Most important, he is free. Everybody else is hung up — as in fact everybody is, you’re hung up, I’m hung up. Right? Sarah is a Joanne Woodward type — though Margot is actually a bit too young and good-looking — but she has never known what it is to be a woman. You know. Her husband, Lipscomb, is out of it too. He sits wringing his hands while the plantation goes to pot. She holds things together, makes a pittance at the library. He’s hung up. Everyone is hung up. The sharecroppers, black and white, are hung up in poverty and ignorance. The townies are hung up in bigotry and so forth. Not only is the stranger free, he is also able to free others. There is the sense about him of having come from far away, perhaps the East, perhaps farther. Perhaps he is a god. At least he is a kind of Christ type.

“He fulfills people. He fulfills the longing of the sharecroppers for their own land — he discovers that Raine’s, Ella’s, family owns the land. He reconciles black and white — who discover their own common humanity during the hurricane. He even gets to the sheriff (God, I wish we could have got Pat Hingle), who despite himself is tremendously moved by this glowing nonviolent vibrant creature — actually there’s a strong hint here of Southern sheriff homosexuality, right? He almost reaches Lipscomb, who has lost his ties with the land, nature, his own sexuality. He does reach Sarah. He walks into the library and while her mouth falls open, he simply goes to the bookshelf, takes down the Rig-Veda, and reads the great passage beginning: ‘Desire entered the One in the beginning.’ Then, again without saying a word, he takes her hand and leads her back into the stacks, where he takes her standing against the old musty books — Thackeray and Dickens and so forth — representing the drying up of Western juices. There’s a lovely tight shot of her face while she’s making love against a dusty set of the Waverley novels. Great? The stranger is the life-giving principle, the books are dead, everyone is dead, Thackeray is dead. Scott is dead, the town is dead, Lipscomb is dead, she is dead, or rather she has never lived. So what we are trying to get across is that it is not just screwing, though there is nothing wrong with that either, but a kind of sacrament and celebration of life. He could be a high priest of Mithras. You see what we’re getting at?”

Something went wrong. Jacoby called for an Arriflex hand-held camera and his assistant Lionel couldn’t locate it. Jacoby came over to talk to Merlin. More or less automatically I held out my hand — not that I wanted to shake hands with him, but we know in the South that the real purpose of manners is to make life easier for everyone, easier both to keep to oneself and to avoid the uneasy commerce of offense and even insult. Either one shakes hands with someone or one ignores him or one kills him. What else is there? Jacoby ignored me. His bemused eye looked through me and past me. I do believe that he did not insult me but rather did not see me. In his absorption I was part of the town decor, one of them. Merlin noticed the oversight and was embarrassed, cleared his throat, did not know what to do. There’s the function of manners: that no one will not know what to do.

I rescued Merlin by asking him how long they were going to work today. “Oh, late! Late!” cried Merlin cordially. “And thanks so much for putting us up”—looking to Jacoby to echo thanks but Jacoby only nodded vaguely. I escaped and went out through the back, the office of the librarian.

Raine and Lucy and Miss Maude, the librarian, were there. Raine kissed me with every appearance of pleasure — what is she? actress? flirt? wanton? nice affectionate girl? Lucy followed suit somewhat absentmindedly. She was so frantic in her crush on Raine that she hardly noticed me.

“Isn’t it exciting!” said Raine, putting her hands on my shoulders, rocking me a little, brushing knees. One knee came between my knees.

“What?”

“The hurricane!”

“I don’t think it’ll get here.”

“But the light! Haven’t you noticed the peculiar yellow light and the sinister quietness about things? Isn’t this usually true of hurricanes?”

“I suppose. I hadn’t really noticed.”

“I was telling Lucy that there is more than coincidence involved here.”

“How’s that?”

“How could such a coincidence happen, that at the very time we are making a film about a hurricane, a real hurricane should come?”

“Well, it could. This is hurricane season.”

“What are the mathematical chances involved? One in a million? There is more than weather involved. There is more than light involved. I feel the convergence of all our separate lines of force. Can’t you feel something changed in the air between all of us?”

“Well—”

“I do, Raine!” cried Lucy, hugging Raine’s arm.

Raine, color high in her cheek, spoke to me with her head ducked, as flirtatiously as Siobhan. Was this her way of being shy about her mystical convictions?

“There’s a force field around all of us, waxing and waning,” said Raine absently, suddenly waning herself, losing interest. She spoke a little more, but inattentively.

“Maybe you’re right, Raine.” I could never figure out the enthusiasm of movie folk. It was as if they were possessed fitfully by demons, but demons of a very low order to whom one needn’t pay strict attention.

Miss Maude, like Lucy, fixed on Raine, eyes glistening.

Dana came moseying in, thumbs hooked in his jeans. Miss Maude’s eyes bulged. He was something to see. Maybe he was the new sunlit god come to save this sad town. But when, ignoring us, he began to talk to Raine, it was about his — investments! Bad news from London, where he had bought a pub which made money but the government took 90 percent of it! “Christ, if I had just listened to Bob about Cayman,” and so forth — fretting! eyes crossed with worry about alimony and taxes, and all at once you saw that he was an optical illusion, a trick, that his beauty was not only accidental and that he had no part in it but that he didn’t even credit himself with it. He was like a hound dog wearing a diamond necklace.

Miss Maude was suddenly possessed by a demon all her own. Imploringly, almost tearfully, eyes glistening, she offered Raine her house for the scene between Lipscomb the decadent planter and his aunt, a strong aristocratic type (“Christ, can’t you see Ouspenskaya doing her!” said Merlin), who tells him his true strength comes from the land. “You always have the land! The land is eternal!” and so forth. Miss Maude seemed to know all about the movie.

“Thank you, Maude,” said Raine, giving her a hug. “I’ll tell Jan and Bob.” Raine, I saw, was in a kind of ecstasy of benevolence. It pleased her to be nice to Miss Maude. Raine’s face shone like a saint’s or like Ingrid Bergman’s. Was it the hurricane which excited her or the exaltation of being a movie star and confirming her stardom in the faces of ordinary folk?

I blinked. All at once Miss Maude, whom I had known all my life or thought I knew, went off her rocker. Or she had been off her rocker for forty years and now at last came to herself. In fact she said so.

Her face suddenly wrinkled up like a prune, her eyes glittered with tears. At first I thought she was crying, but it was not grief, it was happiness, gratitude. She twisted a handkerchief in her hands.

“I just can’t tell you what it means to me,” said Miss Maude, pumping her tired hands back and forth.

“Raine got Jan to give Miss Maude a walk-on in the library scene,” explained Lucy.

“Is there any way I can tell you?” implored Miss Maude, coming ever closer to Raine, wringing her hands, frantic with an emotion not even she could name.

“You did a good job,” said Raine, backing off, getting a little more than she had bargained for. “You’re a beautiful person. Maude.”

“Oh, Raine, Raine, Raine,” said Maude and actually threw back her head and closed her eyes.

I looked at Maude in astonishment. Had everybody in this town gone nuts or was I missing something? The special nuttiness of the movie people I was used to, but the town had gone nuts. Town folk, not just Maude, acted as if they lived out their entire lives in a dim charade, a shadow-play in which they were the shadows, and now all at once to have appear miraculously in their midst these resplendent larger-than-life beings. She, Maude, couldn’t get over it: not only had they turned up in her library, burnishing the dim shelves with their golden light; she had for a moment been one of them!

Presently Mrs. Robichaux, a dentist’s wife, whom all these years I had taken to be a mild comely content little body, showed up from nowhere and told Raine she would do anything, anything, for the company: “even carry klieg lights!”

The world had gone crazy, said the crazy man in his cell. What was nutty was that the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world but the real world thought that its reality could only be found in the illusions. Two sets of maniacs.

Somehow they had dropped the ball between them.

Lionel came in close with the Arriflex camera saddled on his shoulder. Again Dana moved against Margot. He looked straight into her eyes, lazily and with no difficulty. Margot looked back with difficulty. Three lights were reflected in her pupil.

Jacoby held both of them, his bent hands on their shoulders, eyes fixed on the floor, like a referee talking to boxers.

“Dear,” he said to Margot, “this time let’s try it this way. I want your legs wrapped around him.”

He’s not from Poland, I thought. He’d lost his accent again.

“How?” asked Margot faintly.

“How? Christ, just do it. He’ll help. He’s going to grab your ass and hold you off the floor. Don’t worry.”

“All right.”

“And when you say your one line: ‘You will be gentle with me, won’t you?’ I want to hear both fear and tenderness. Can you manage that, dear?”

“I’ll try.”

“Yeah, all right. You ready? Remember, Dana, I want to hear the zipper. It’s important.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Merlin,” I asked, “what happens to, ah, Lipscomb in the end?”

Merlin shrugged. “Just what you might suppose. He is almost reached, first by the stranger, then by his own aunt. But in the end he slips away from both. He gently subsides into booze and Chopin. Sarah opts for life, he for death. The stranger is immolated by a town mob who think they hate him but really hate the life forces in themselves that he stirs. He is the new Christ, of course.”

I walked back to Belle Isle on the levee. Sure enough, the air had got heavy and still. Yet far above, black clouds were racing, fleeing north of their own accord like the blackbirds which rose from the swamp disquieted. A yellow light filled the space between earth and clouds as if the Christmas bonfires were already burning.

I couldn’t stand it. I still can’t stand it. I can’t stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age. What is more, I won’t. That was my discovery: that I didn’t have to.

If you were right, I could stand it. If your Christ were king and all that stuff you believe — Christ, do you still believe it? — were true, I could stand it. But you don’t even believe it yourself, do you? All you can think about is that girl on the levee. No wonder you don’t have time to pray for the dead. All you can think about is getting that girl over the levee into the willows.

No? But if what you once believed were true, I could stand the way things are.

Or if my great-great-grandfather were right, I could live with that. Do you know what he did? He had a duel! Not a gentlemanly affaire d’honneur under the Audubon oaks in New Orleans, but a fight to the death with fists and knives just like Jim Bowie, in fact on the same sand bar. He had won a lot of money in a poker game in Alexandria. The heavy loser took it hard and began muttering about cheating. That was bad enough. But he made a mistake. He mentioned my kinsman’s mother’s name. She was a d’Arbouche from New Roads. Now my kinsman was a swarthy man; he looked like Jean Lafitte. “What’s that you said?” he asked the fellow, who then said something like, “You got the right name all right.” “And how is that?” asked my ancestor pleasantly. “Well, it’s d’Arbouche, isn’t it, or is it Tarbrouche?” Which was to say that my ancestor had a touch of the tarbrush which was in turn to say that his mother, a very white Creole lady, had had sexual relations with a Negro, and offhand it is harder to say which was the deadlier insult: that she had had sexual relations with a man other than her husband, or that the man was a Negro. “I see,” said my ancestor. “Well, I’ll tell you what I propose. You and I will meet in four hours, which is dawn, on the Vidalia sand bar, which is outside the jurisdiction of both Louisiana and Mississippi. With one Bowie knife apiece. No seconds.” They met. Seconds did come but were scared and hid in the willows. They fought. My ancestor killed his man, was badly cut on the arms and face, but managed to grab the fellow, turn him around, and cut his throat from ear to ear. Then he sent for an ax, beheaded, dismembered, and quartered the body, and fed it to the catfishes. He washed himself in the river, bound his wounds, and he and his friends rowed over to Natchez-under-the-Hill and ate a hearty breakfast.

I could live that way, crude as it was, though I do not think men should butcher each other like animals. But it is at least a way to live. One knows where one stands and what one can do. Even defeat is better than not knowing.

Or I could live your way if it were true.

What I can’t stand is the way things are now. Furthermore, I will not stand for it.

Stand for what, you ask? Well, for that, to give an insignificant example. What you’re looking at. You see the movie poster across the street? The 69ers? Man and woman yin-yanged, fellatioed, cunnilinged on the corner of Felicity and Annunciation Streets? What would I do about it? Quite simply it would be removed.

Come here, Percival, I want to tell you something. It is not a confession but a secret. It is not a sin because I do not know what a sin is. I understand that before you can sin, you must know what sin is — Bless me, Father, for I have done something which I don’t understand. I know what a trespass or an injury or an insult is — something to be set right. So I’m telling you this and, confession or not, I consider you bound by the seal of friendship if not the confessional.

Come over here. Never mind the window. Look at me. We’ve been through a great deal together: school, war, talk, whoring, football, nice girls, hot girls, so since you understand me and my past — if you don’t, nobody does — I’m going to tell you my plans for the future. There is going to be a new order of things and I shall be part of it. Don’t confuse it with anything you’ve heard of before. Certainly not with your Holy Name Society or Concerned Christians Against Smut. This has nothing to do with Christ or boycotts. Don’t confuse it with the Nazis. They were stupid. If in fact there was a need to clean up the Weimar Republic and if in fact they did in part, they screwed everything up by getting off on the Jews. What stupidity! The Jews were not to blame. The Nazis were clods, thugs. What they should have done was invite the Jews. Half the Jews would have joined them — just as half the Catholics did. Don’t confuse it with the Klan, those poor ignorant bastards. Blacks, Jews, Catholics — they are all irrelevant; blaming them only confuses the issue. We’ll invite them and you. Don’t confuse it with Southern white trash Wallace politics. It’s got nothing to do with politics.

It is none of these things. What is it then?

It is simply this: a conviction and a freedom. The conviction: I will not tolerate this age. The freedom: the freedom to act on my conviction. And I will act. No one else has both the conviction and the freedom. Many agree with me, have the conviction, but will not act. Some act. assassinate, bomb, burn, etc., but they are the crazies. Crazy acts by crazy people. But what if one, sober, reasonable, and honorable man should act, and act with perfect sobriety, reason, and honor? Then you have the beginning of a new age. We shall start a new order of things.

We? Who are we? We will not even be a secret society as you know such things. Its members will know each other without signs or passwords. No speeches, rallies, political parties. There will be no need of such things. One man will act. Another man will act. We will know each other as gentlemen used to know each other — no, not gentlemen in the old sense — I’m not talking about social classes. I’m talking about something held in common by men, Gentile, Jew, Greek, Roman, slave, freeman, black, white, and so recognized between them: a stern code, a gentleness toward women and an intolerance of swinishness, a counsel kept, and above all a readiness to act, and act alone if necessary — there’s the essential ingredient — because as of this moment not one in 200 million Americans is ready to act from perfect sobriety and freedom. If one man is free to act alone, you don’t need a society. How will we know each other? The same way General Lee and General Forrest would know each other at a convention of used-car dealers on Bourbon Street: Lee a gentleman in the old sense. Forrest not, but in this generation of vipers they would recognize each other instantly.

You have your Sacred Heart. We have Lee. We are the Third Revolution. The First Revolution in 1776 against the stupid British succeeded. The Second Revolution in 1861 against the money-grubbing North failed — as it should have because we got stuck with the Negro thing and it was our fault. The Third Revolution will succeed. What is the Third Revolution? You’ll see.

I cannot tolerate this age. And I will not. I might have tolerated you and your Catholic Church, and even joined it, if you had remained true to yourself. Now you’re part of the age. You’ve the same fleas as the dogs you’ve lain down with. I would have felt at home at Mont-Saint-Michel, the Mount of the Archangel with the flaming sword, or with Richard Coeur de Lion at Acre. They believed in a God who said he came not to bring peace but the sword. Make love not war? I’ll take war rather than what this age calls love. Which is a better world, this cocksucking cuntlapping assholelicking fornicating Happyland U.S.A. or a Roman legion under Marcus Aurelius Antoninus? Which is worse, to die with T. J. Jackson at Chancellorsville or live with Johnny Carson in Burbank?

Yes, I’ll be out of here in a month or two. What do we intend to do, you ask? We? I can only speak for me. Others will then do likewise. But let me give you an example from my future life. Yes! I may be uncertain about the past, about what happened — it’s all confused, I’d rather not think about it — but I know what the future and the new order and my life will be like. The new order will not be based on Catholicism or Communism or fascism or liberalism or capitalism or any ism at all, but simply on that stem rectitude valued by the new breed and marked by the violence which will attend its breach. We will not tolerate this age. Don’t speak to me of Christian love. Whatever came of it? I’ll tell you what came of it. It got mouthed off on the radio and TV from the pulpit and that was the end of it. The Jews knew better. Billy Graham lay down with Nixon and got up with a different set of fleas, but the Jewish prophets lived in deserts and wildernesses and had no part with corrupt kings. I’ll prophesy: This country is going to turn into a desert and it won’t be a bad thing. Thirst and hunger are better than jungle rot. We will begin in the Wilderness where Lee lost. Deserts are clean places. Corpses turn quickly into simply pure chemicals.

Then how shall we live if not with Christian love? One will work and take care of one’s own. live and let live, and behave with a decent respect toward others. If there cannot be love — you call that love out there? — there will be a tight-lipped courtesy between men. And chivalry toward women. Women must be saved from the whoredom they’ve chosen. Women will once again be strong and modest. Children will be merry because they will know what they are to do.

Oh, you wish to know what my own life will be like? (Look at you, all at once abstract and understanding and leading me on, all ears like one of these psychologists: why can’t you priests stick to being priests for a change?) Very well, I will tell you. I plan to marry Anna here in the next room. I think she’ll have me. You can marry us if you like. I shall love and protect her. I can make her well. I know that I can just as I know I can do what I choose to do. She is much better already. Yesterday we watched the clouds flying along and she smiled. She is the first woman of the new order. For she has, so to speak, endured the worst of the age and survived it, undergone the ultimate violation and come out of it not only intact but somehow purged, innocent. Who else might the new Virgin be but a gang-raped social worker? I do not joke. Her ordeal has made her like a ten-year-old.

We shall live in this neighborhood. I like it here. New Orleans is a shabby gentle benign place. We shall buy a small Victorian cottage under the levee and live a simple life.

But we will not tolerate this age. It is not enough to destroy it. We shall build a new order.

Actually, you don’t have to worry. Killings will not be necessary. I have discovered something. I’ve discovered that even in this madhouse if you tell someone something, face to face, with perfect seriousness, without emotion, gazing directly at him, he will believe you. One need only speak with authority. Was not that the new trait that people noticed about your Lord, that he spoke with authority?

The point is, I will not tolerate this age. Millions agree with me and know that this age is not tolerable, but no one will act except the crazies and they are part of the age. The mad Mansons are nothing more than the ultimate spasm-orgasm of a dying world. We are only here to give it the coup de grâce. We shall not wait for it to fester and rot any longer. We will kill it.

You are looking at me for a change. Good. At least you are not smiling at me. Yes, I am a patient in a mental hospital, more than that, a prisoner. Yes, I am aware that you are accustomed to the ravings of madmen. Yes, I see you are aware that I give myself a certain license to talk crazy, so to speak. I might even be joking. But I am also aware from a certain wariness in your eyes that you are not absolutely certain I am not serious. You must decide that for yourself.

Why do I tell you this? As a warning. You can issue the warning if you like. There is only a little time. Perhaps a matter of months. The 69ers poster had better come down. But of course it will not.

We will not tolerate the way things are.

What’s the matter? You look stricken for the first time since you’ve been coming here. Ha ha, so at last I’ve gotten a rise out of you.

What did you say? What happened to me?

What do you mean? Do you mean what happened at Belle Isle?

That’s in the past. I don’t see what difference it makes.

You want to know what happened?

Hm. It’s hard to remember. Jesus, let me think. My head aches. I feel lousy. Let me lie down for a while. You don’t look so hot either. You’re pale as a ghost.

Come back tomorrow.

HOW COME YOU’RE WEARING your priest uniform today? Are you girding for battle or dressed up like Lee for the surrender?

Never mind. I wasn’t thinking about you anyway but about Margot.

“You men flatter yourselves,” I remember Margot telling me. “You are not that important to us.”

You men? Us? Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?

Christ, what were we talking about? Oh yes, Percival, you wanted to know what happened? Jesus, what difference does it make? It is the future that matters. Yes, you’re right. I did say there was something that still bothered me. What? Sin? The uncertainty that there is such a thing? I don’t remember. Anyhow, it doesn’t seem very interesting.

What a gloomy day. The winter rains have set in. I understand there is a depression in the Gulf. It’s a bit late for hurricanes, isn’t it? Isn’t it November?

But it would be appropriate, would it not? A hurricane coming now while I tell you about Hurricane Marie a year ago which came while an artificial movie hurricane was blowing down Belle Isle!

Really I should be feeling good if another hurricane is on the way. I used to enjoy hurricanes. Most people do, though they won’t admit it, everybody does in fact, except a few sane people, for after all hurricanes are by any sane standard very unpleasant affairs. But what does that prove except that most people today are crazy? I am supposed to be crazy but one sign of my returning sanity is that I don’t in the least look forward to hurricanes. I knew a married couple once who were bored with life, disliked each other, hated their own lives, and were generally miserable — except during hurricanes. Then they sat in their house at Pass Christian, put a bottle of whiskey between them, felt a surge of happiness, were able to speak frankly and cheerfully to each other, laugh and joke, drink, even make love. But that is crazy. Why should people be miserable in good weather and happy in bad? Surely not because they are sinners in good weather and saints in bad. True, people help each other in catastrophes. But they don’t feel good because they help each other. They help each other because they feel good. No, it’s because something has happened to us which is so bad that we don’t even have a word for it. Sin isn’t the word. Your Christ didn’t exactly foresee anything like this, did he? Hurricanes, which are very bad things, somehow neutralize the other bad thing which has no name, so that one can breathe easy, become free once again to sin or not to sin. The couple I spoke of became free and happy only during the passage of the eye of the hurricane, that is, capable of both love and hate (ordinarily they were numb, moved like ghosts), of honesty and lying. It became possible for the husband to say: “Often I secretly wish you were dead. In fact, an hour ago, before the hurricane struck, I was thinking it wouldn’t be a bad idea if the hurricane blew away the belvedere and you with it — I’d take my chances.” (Is that a sin?) “In fact I was contemplating my new life as a widower. Not such a bad prospect. Think of the women I could have here in Pass Christian without you around.” A window crashed before the wind, showering them with glass splinters. He looked at the blood. “But now I can honestly say it is good we are together. If you blew away. I’d come after you.” To which the wife replied: “The truth is, I’m bloody tired of cooking and housekeeping for you. If we live through this. I think I’ll go out and get a job. Perhaps move out altogether. Then it will be nice to see you in the evenings. We used to have a good time. I liked you. I feel much better in fact. Let’s bandage the cuts and have a drink.” They had several drinks. The wind howled and they laughed like children. The house shook like a leaf. They made love in a 160-mile-per-hour gust.

To tell you the truth, it didn’t work out for them after all. Or maybe it did. Anyhow, after the hurricane they took a good hard look at each other on a sunny Monday morning and got a divorce.

I found Margot in the belvedere atop Belle Isle battening down the house for Hurricane Marie. She looked surprised to see me, squinting at me during the lightning flashes as if she couldn’t place me. It came as a shock to her to see me leave my customary niche in place and time. It makes people nervous for one to step out of one’s role. I had become for her part of the furniture of Belle Isle, like the console with the petticoat mirror.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, then again looked puzzled to have asked such a strange question. Why shouldn’t I be here in my own house?

“What are you doing here?”

“I can’t get this dern window down.” The belvedere with its widow’s walk outside looked like the passenger cabin of a small ferry. Benches and windows lined the four sides.

Helping her with the window. I found myself thinking how, despite her several transformations, she still had a lot of Texas country girl in her. Even after she became a Southern belle. Mardi Gras matron, chatelaine of Belle Isle, she’d forget and curse like a cowboy — it only took pain, finger caught in station-wagon door: “Shee-it fire!” Or impatience with blacks: “What the hail you think you’re doing, boy,” she’d holler at Fluker gaping and goofing off at his sweeping, snatch the broom, and sweep like a frontier wife. Sharp of eye and quick to observe and imitate, she lapsed only in her swear words and her way of disposing of her mucus. Now and then she’d hawk and spit. One time when we were leaving Le Début des Jeunes Filles de Nouvelle Orléans, clear of the door and safe in the dark, she leaned out over the gutter on Royal Street and blew her nose with her fingers, slinging snot expertly. I could imagine her in her senility, dropping all her latter-day guises and cursing and hawking in a nursing home.

She was as quick to pick up the bad manners of the film folk as the good manners of the gentry, yet she did it good-humoredly as if these transformations might be necessary but were not to be taken too seriously. What was surprising was how quickly she got onto the nutty nuances of actors and such. In a matter of weeks she had shed her Texas drawl and picked up the round deracinated bell tone of Raine Robinette, who like June Allyson (Merlin said) came from Washington Heights, even the plaintive up-pitched grace note at the end of each sentence, Raine’s trademark, so Merlin had to correct her — she dropped it as quickly — and the actors’ way of droning away in their mock enthusiasm for mock projects. Jacoby would go on and on about moving to Louisiana and starting a crawfish farm, going into great detail about the marketing and distribution of this remarkable shellfish, yet do it with a slight gap of inattention even to himself as if he were listening to his voice. What was surprising was how good she was at acting like one of them and how lousy she was at acting the second the cameras rolled.

In the lightning flashes I was looking at her and thinking how much I loved her. “Loved” her? Being “in love.” What does that mean? It means that I lived for love. “Lived for love.” What does that mean? It means simply that she was my happiness and that without her I was not happy. As the saying goes, I didn’t know what happiness was until I met her. Do you notice that it is impossible to speak of love without sounding like Tin Pan Alley? But it’s the truth nevertheless. I can’t live without you. Jesus, is there any other way to say it? I might have been content in my unhappiness if I had not met her, like one of those cave fish that don’t have eyes and don’t miss the sun.

But if I loved her, why did the discovery of her infidelity cause a pang of pleasure within me?

Before we were married she would drive by my office mid-afternoons and pick me up. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“But, Margot, I’m bushed”—I, a mole, a creaky, seer-suckered, liberal mole droning out the days with title search, estate succession, and integrating the schools of Feliciana Parish. Perhaps this was what I thought happiness was: keeping the River Road estates intact for the white gentry and evening things up by helping the Negroes.

Off we’d go, up or down the River Road, she driving her little $20,000 Mercedes, top down. I still blinking like a mole in the October sunlight beside her, dusty from the Annotated Louisiana Code, sniffing the German leather warm and fragrant in the sun.

Strange: It was almost as if she were the man, I the woman, so much did she take the lead, work the radio, drive the car like a man, drum her nails on the wheel, gauge the traffic, look swiftly back past me to change lanes, cast ahead in her mind for destination and route. I lumpish and docile in the seat beside her, hands in my lap, like a big dumb coed.

Like a man she was. I said, except that she would tilt her head and cut her eyes over to me, lids narrowed, lips thinned, seriously yet unseriously, as no man ever did. Or, to make herself comfortable in the hot afternoon sun, in a quick second’s motion lift her ass off the seat (she could dress in thirty seconds: she told me when she was a child she used to walk to town on Saturday in school clothes and change in the filling station restroom), hike her skirt up exposing her legs. Thought I, goofy from work and drunk on October pine-winey sunlight, catching sight of the sweet heavy convergence of her inner thighs: that is where I want to live, make my habitation.

“Well?” she’d say, driving up on the levee, stopping and leaning over the wheel cradled in her arms (like a man), gaze sideways at me, diamonds of sweat glittering on her upper lip.

Aha! She’s parked. What next? I felt a tingling running up the backs of my legs. Is this the way a woman feels, I wondered, when the man parks? Hm. We’re parked! What next?

“You know what you are?” she’d ask.

“No, what?”

“A big raunchy Sterling Hayden.”

“Who’s he?”

“Sterling Hayden tending bar in Macao, in seersuckers.”

“Is that good?”

They were beautiful October days. Do you know that I made one of the biggest discoveries of my life? It is the simplest of all discoveries but do you know that to this good day I don’t know whether I was the last man on earth to make it or whether I was the only man. Was I the dumbest man in the world or the luckiest? It is this: There is a life to be lived and a joy in living it and the joy has nothing to do with our crazy college carryings-on or with my crazy romantic dream of love with Lucy at Highlands. No, it was so much simpler than that. It was simply that there is such a thing as a beautiful day to go out into, a road to travel, good food to eat when you’re hungry, wine to drink when you’re thirsty, and most of all, 99 percent of all, no: all of all: a woman to love.

What else is there really in life, dear Percival, than love, an October day, a slope of levee, warm lips to kiss, and this droll man-woman creature lying beside me who was mostly man driving the car until the moment I kissed her, when all at once she became all woman and I could feel her neck giving way in that sweet flection-extension no man’s vertebrae ever managed, and her body of itself and in all its lovely breadth turn toward me on its axis to greet, salute me.

Yes, she loved me then. How do I know? Because at last I woke from my stupor and, remembering what courting was, courted her. In love, I drove to New Orleans to get her out of a Colonial Dames convention (for some reason it was important to her to be a Dame and damned if she didn’t haul me to South Carolina to find and photograph the tombstone of her only WASP ancestor (no Reilly in that war! a Johnson — sure enough, a Private Aaron Johnson killed in the Battle of Cowpens!). Into the ballroom of the St. Charles I walked, and up and down the aisle until I spied her in the crowd of two thousand lily-white Dames listening to another Dame talking about preserving U.S. ideals and so forth and, spotting her, signaled her out with a peremptory angling off of head and she came out, at first fearful: Was somebody dead? — then clapped her hands with joy, hugged and kissed me: “Oh, I’m so glad to see you! You came to see me! to get me? Oh oh—”

Being “in love” means that my heart leaped at the sight of her. I felt like clapping my hands too. Why her and no other woman? She had two eyes, a nose, mouth, legs like a billion other women — like a million other good-looking women, yet she acquired for me a priceless value. Elizabeth Taylor, as beautiful as she was then, could have walked by and I wouldn’t have looked at her twice. It was almost religious. Things she owned were like saints’ relics. The place where she lived with Tex, the big Garden District house, became a shrine — I could drive around and around the block and feel the tingle in my legs when I caught sight of the house — a Taj Mahal which held my live princess.

Was it possible that a man could be so happy on one afternoon and that there were so many afternoons? It was all so simple. We’d drive until we found a pretty place, a stretch of levee, a meadow off the Natchez Trace. We’d walk till we got tired, drink, eat, kiss, neck!

A confession: She took the lead the first time. No, not the first. The second. The first was my crude way with her the first time I saw her, barefoot and muddy, at Belle Isle, getting under her hoopskirt and so forth.

That day we had eaten crawfish étouffé and gumbo and drunk two bottles of wine and were full and happy and zooming up the River Road in the October twilight and I was thinking of a place to go to park, maybe even a meadow to lie in. But she just said: “Let’s go to bed.” I swallowed hard and felt like saying gollee or something like, a thirty-five-year-old man: gollee. Nowadays any eighteen-year-old would laugh at me. Yes, but I notice that young men are not as happy with their girls, at least not as happy as I was. “Do you know a place?” she asked. Happily, I did, in Asphodel, a little tourist cottage in a glen off the Trace. My hand trembled as I registered. She undressed without bothering to turn out the light (as quickly as in the Texaco restroom in Odessa: zip! zip! naked!). She stood naked before the mirror, hands at her hair, one knee bent, pelvis aslant. She turned to me and put her hands under my coat and in her funny way took hold of a big pinch of my flank on each side. Gollee. Could any woman have been as lovely? She was like a feast. She was a feast. I wanted to eat her. I ate her.

That was my communion, Father — no offense intended, that sweet dark sanctuary guarded by the heavy gold columns of her thighs, the ark of her covenant.

I helped her with the windows in the belvedere. It was not a hurricane yet but an ordinary thunderstorm. From this height one could see in the lightning white caps in the river and the far bank. It was like the sea.

She sat on the bench eyes straight ahead like a seasick passenger.

“Margot, let’s leave.”

“What?” The storm made a racket.

“Let’s get in the car and drive to North Carolina. Right now. The colors are at their height. Siobhan is with Tex, Lucy’s going back to school tomorrow.”

She was silent.

“Think of it. We could drive clear of the hurricane, make it to Atlanta by two o’clock.” I was thinking about the moment of entering a motel with her, the moment she always paused at the mirror and raised her hands to her hair. I was also trying to remember the last time I slept with her. How had it happened that we were not sleeping together? What was I doing living in an outhouse? I tried to remember.

“No.” I had to sit close to her to hear for she spoke without raising her voice, eyes staring unfocused and unblinking. “The company is leaving day after tomorrow. We — they — can’t afford to lose two or three days to a hurricane. And there’s no need really. The two or three interior Belle Isle scenes can be shot anywhere.”

“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.

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.

Something was indeed wrong with Elgin’s camera. The figures, tiny figurines, were reddish, like people in a film darkroom, and seemed to meet, merge, and flow through each other. Lights and darks were reversed like a negative, mouths opened on light, eyes were white sockets. The actors looked naked clothed, clothed naked. The figures seemed to be blown in an electronic wind. Bodies bent, pieces blew off. Hair danced atop heads like a candle flame. I stared. Didn’t Elgin say the figures were nothing but electrons?

FIRST FEATURE: MISS MARGOT’S ROOM

Who were these two dim rosy figures moving silently in a red sea?

I rewound the reel and examined the reel case. The label was neatly printed, MISS MARGOT’S ROOM, exactly like the chaste and formal museum signs mounted on the brass posts supporting velvet ropes in Belle Isle.

Two figures were standing, talking. They were not naked. Their clothes were light and their faces dark. It was Merlin and Margot. I recognized the shape of Merlin’s rooster shock of hair even though it flickered on his head like Pentecostal flame. Margot I knew instantly from the bright earmuff fluffs of hair at her ears and her mannish yet womanish way of setting her fist on her hip.

When they talked, their mouths opened on light.

They embraced.

The sound was not much better than the video. The voices were scratchy and seemed to come not from the room but from the sky like the blackbirds rattling and rising and falling. When they turned, their voices went away. Half sentences blew away like their bodies.

They embraced again. Merlin held her off, their bodies flowing apart like a Y.

MERLIN: You know that I always—(pause)—wish you every—

(You know that I always will love you? I wish you every happiness?)

MARGOT: (An assentive murmur.)

MERLIN: But what an ire — Oh, Christ — end — of a phizz infirm—

(But what an irony! Oh, Christ that it should end because of a physical infirmity?)

MARGOT: It did—

(It didn’t?)

MERLIN — a disproportion like Lee losing Gettysburg because of di—

(Diarrhea?)

MARGOT: Don’t be

MERLIN: It’s flat-out god — unax — Jesus.

(It’s flat-out goddamn unacceptable, Jesus?)

MARGOT: Jesus, men. You are all so—

(Jesus what?)

Were they talking about me?

No.

They embrace again. Blobs like breasts swell on Merlin’s shoulder and blow off toward Margot.

MERLIN: I fear for — But I wish you both ever—

(I fear for you. But I wish you both every happiness.)

You both? Me? No.

MARGOT: (A deprecative murmur.)

MERLIN: I love you so f (?) — v (?) — much.

(I love you so fucking much? so very much? probably the former considering the two-syllable beat.)

MARGOT: I love you — oh s — (?) — oh sh — (?)

(I love you too. Oh so much. Or: I love you too. Oh shit, or sheet? or she-it. Probably the last, two beats, two syllables, and knowing Margot.)

MERLIN: DO you believe I love — enough — truth?

(???)

MARGOT: (A wary murmur.)

MERLIN: Why — wonder—

(???)

MERLIN: —could be exploit—

(He could be exploiting you?)

MARGOT: (Turning away: they come apart, Y becoming II.)

MERLIN: (An expostulation.)

MARGOT:!

MERLIN: —mon—

(???) (Money?)

MARGOT: NO.

MERLIN: Christ — not — even sure — part.

(Christ, you’re not even sure you have the part?)

MARGOT: You bas—

(You bastard.)

MERLIN: Well—?

MARGOT: Up — oars, oo bas—

(Up yours, you bastard.)

MERLIN: Oh, Jesus — I’d kike — oars.

(Oh, Jesus how I’d like to be up yours?)

MARGOT: (An indifferent murmur.)

MERLIN: Besides that — a basic incap — intimace—

(Besides that he has a basic incapacity for intimacy?)

MARGOT: I don’t care.

MERLIN: What a lousy trucking fire engine.

(What a lousy fucking triangle? I am reasonably sure of this reading: that it was not Elgin’s equipment but Merlin himself who scrambled “fucking triangle” to “trucking fiangle” (fire engine). A joke. Yes, I am 99 percent sure.)

MARGOT: DO you believe I still — you?

(Do you believe I still love you?)

MERLIN: Oh, Chr—

MARGOT: Sh — sh — sh!

(Shush shush shush? or: shit shit shit? shit shit shit.)

The tiny figurines embrace again, sectors of their trunks blowing out like pseudopods of amoebae. Their bodies seem to have magnetic properties.

MERLIN: —wish you — all happ—

(I wish y’all happiness? I wish you all happiness? The latter? Merlin wouldn’t say “y’all.”)

Merlin vanishes. Margot droops and is still, like a puppet hung from its string.

It is a triangle. At first I thought I was part of the triangle, the losing angle, so:

Then I see they are not talking about me at all, that it is a different triangle:

Another figure materializes (they don’t seem to use doors). It is Jacoby. There is no way of recognizing him except by his shortness and stockiness and his big head, which he carries confidently between his shoulders. Like many short men he is of a piece, body, brain, organs compacted and operating in close order. All would be well with him, one feels, except he is shorter than Margot. He makes up for this shortcoming by a kind of confident lolling back of head. It is his way of not having to look up at her; he holds her off as if to say: Well, my dear, let’s have a look at you.

They make a Y connected as far as the waist.

They do not speak but their mouths and eyes open on light. Are they whispering?

They dress, putting dark on light. No, it is undressing, for dark is light and light is dark. They are shedding light clothes for dark skin.

They approach each other. Sections of their bodies detach and fly off. Other sections extend pseudopods.

They turn, their hair blowing sideways in an electric wind. There are two sockets of light on Margot’s back. They are, I recognize, the two dimples on either side of her sacrum.

Margot lies across the bed and pulls him onto her. He is gazing down at her. Her head comes off the bed and bends back until her face is looking upside down at the camera. Her eyes close on light, but her mouth opens letting out light.

Still there is no conversation but presently a voice says, at first I think from my room or even from the sky with the blackbirds: Oh oh oh ah ah aaah, oh my Jesus oh ah ah sh — sh — sh—

???

But the voice is not immediately recognizable as either Margot’s or Jacoby’s, being hoarser than Margot’s and higher than Jacoby’s.

A prayer?

INTERMISSION

I switch off the machine and walk out into the skyey day. There is the blinded dazzled headachy sensation of coming out of a movie in the afternoon. The blackbirds are rising and settling, the wind has picked up but is fitful, blowing sycamore leaves back and forth across my tiny pigeon porch.

I sit on my porch and watch the blackbirds rising and settling and the clouds hurrying toward the hurricane like latecomers to the kickoff.

The blackbirds fall silent. The clouds straighten out and form a line. The sky becomes flat and yellow. The view from the porch is very simple. There are six parallel horizontal lines, the bottom rail of the iron fence, the top rail, the near edge of the River Road, the far edge, the top of the levee, the straight bottom line of the clouds. There are many short vertical lines, the iron spikes of the fence. There is a single oblique line, a gravel road leading from the River Road over the levee. Atop the levee are the triangles of the bonfires. The slanting boom of a ship intersects with the triangle of the bonfires, making trapezoids and smaller triangles.

The hurricane machine cranks up. The live oaks blow inside out. It is necessary to use the hurricane machine even though a real hurricane is coming, not just because the real hurricane is not yet here, but because even if it were it wouldn’t be as suitable for film purposes as an artificial hurricane.

SECOND FEATURE: MISS RAINES ROOM

There are three red figures on the pink bed. Pieces of bodies, ribs, thighs, torsos, fly off one body and join another body. Hair blows in a magnetic wind. Mouths and eyes open on light. Light pubic triangles turn like mobiles, now narrowing, now widening, changing from equilateral triangles to isosceles triangles to lines of light. The posters of the bed make a frame.

Lucy is lying lengthwise in the middle of the bed. She is recognizable by the flame-curl of hair under her ears, by her big breasts, and by the still slightly immature not wholly incurved line between calf and knee. Lucy is like a patient. Certain operations are being performed on her. The other two figures handle her as efficiently as nurses. Raine is slim and swift, moving so fast her body leaves ectoplasm behind. Dana stands naked and musing beside the bed, one hand browsing over his shoulder like an athlete in a locker room.

The three lie together. Their bodies fuse but their arms move like a six-arm Shiva.

Now they are doing something else. Dana kneels in a horizontal plane, takes Lucy’s head in both hands, and guides it toward him. Raine moves much more quickly. Her sleek head flies off and burrows into Lucy’s stomach.

The figures make a rough swastikaed triangle:

Elgin is right. The sound track is poor. No words are audible except near the end an unrecognizable voice which is neither clearly male or female seems to come from nowhere and everywhere — and only fragments at that: Oh Christ dear sweet Jesus oh oh—

Another prayer?

Crows begin to fly north against the wind. It is unusual to see crows in such numbers, flocking like blackbirds. Then they straggle out for a mile. Ellis Buell says crows are the smartest of all birds. This is probably true. At least I know for a fact they know the range of a shotgun (Fluker claims they can distinguish a twenty gauge from a twelve, then move just out of range). The only time I ever killed a crow was by pure luck and a.22 rifle. He was flying at least five hundred feet high. Without expectation I led him by three feet and shot him through the head. Surprised, he fell at my feet with a thump. A ruby drop of blood hung from his black bill.

Still I had to watch the 5:30 news!

Unhooking the videotape, I turned on the TV. The hurricane watch had been changed to a hurricane warning. Marie, two hundred miles due south, was headed due north. She filled the whole Gulf. It became necessary to make preparations.

Everyone became serious and happy.

Storekeepers seriously-happily boarded up their windows. Volunteers seriously-happily sandbagged the levee. Shoppers seriously-happily shopped for battery radios, batteries, flashlights, Coleman lamps, kerosene lamps, kerosene, candles, canned goods, powdered milk, dried apricots, Hershey bars, raisins.

Happiest and most serious of all were owners of fallout shelters dug out during the A-bomb scare many years ago and never used. Happy families huddled underground around TV sets showing Marie spinning ever closer.

Happy drinkers sat in friendly bars under the levee drinking Dixie beer and reminiscing about other hurricanes. Even householders of low-lying houses left home happily, headed for motels in the Mississippi hills. Ordinarily bored police rode happily up and down country roads and bayous warning people to evacuate.

I too made certain preparations. I made a shopping list but, unlike other shoppers, I first discarded certain objects before purchasing others. Assembling the video cameras, tape deck, tapes, recorder, amplifier — some $4,500 worth — I packed the lot in a Gladstone bag and at nightfall hauled it over the levee to a skiff locked to a cypress in the batture, rowed out two hundred yards, and dropped the bag in the channel. When I regained the batture I was half a mile downstream but it was easy rowing back in dead water.

Only then did I make my shopping list. Besides the usual hurricane items it contained:

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL DAY! Don’t you think so? The last day of the hurricane season. All danger of hurricanes past. The morning sun bright and high refracted through the clear crystal prism of northern air with that special moderation, the promise of warmth, of fine November days in New Orleans. Everything is mild and unexceptional here, isn’t it? even the weather. By eleven o’clock the winos on Camp Street will be creeping out of their holes and stretching out or curling up like cats in sunny doorways to take a little nap. Not a bad life.

Stop pacing up and down. I’m the prisoner, not you. Why the long race, the frowning preoccupation? Look at the street. Even the cemetery, especially the cemetery, looks cheerful. The mums are still fresh and yellow. The tombs spick-and-span, the rain trees bright as new copper pennies. Yesterday young people were singing in the old section. Some of them even sleep in the oven crypts, shove the bones aside and unroll their sleeping bags, a perfect fit. An odd thing about New Orleans: the cemeteries here are more cheerful than the hotels and the French Quarter. Tell me why that should be, why two thousand dead Creoles should be more alive than two thousand Buick dealers?

Ah, I forgot to tell you my good news. I’m leaving today. They’re discharging me. Psychiatrically fit and legally innocent. I can prove I am sane. Can you? Why do you look at me like that? You don’t think they should? Well, in any case, my lawyer got a writ of habeas corpus and my psychiatrist says I’m fit as a fiddle, saner in fact than he — the poor man is overworked, depressed, and lives on Librium.

Just think of it! At noon I shall walk through the front door of this building for the first time in a year, stroll down that block of Annunciation Street I’ve studied so minutely, turn the corner of Tchoupitoulas, and read that sign there.

Free &