Walker Percy - Lancelot

“Thank you, Lock.”

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

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

“I’ll do them.”

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

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

“Yes.” All ears now.

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

“Right.”

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

“Yes. They left their clothes there.”

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

“Technical problem?”

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

“Movie? What kind of movie?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quite a discovery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margot was sick! Hurray.

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

My God, why was I torturing myself?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”