Walker Percy - Lancelot

“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.”