Walker Percy - Lancelot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyhow she knew. That is, she knew something.

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

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

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

“Come here,” said Raine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” she asked. “Oh.”

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

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

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

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

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

But I did not see them after all. I felt them.

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

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

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