Lancelot

by Walker Percy

  “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 br
ight 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.

  Bobby McGee got away, but she wasn’t getting away from me. I didn’t want freedom, I wanted her beside me on the grass, the sun making copper lights on her coarse springy hair, her miraculous gold skin glowing with a sunlight all its own. Pass the bottle, pass the Seven-Up, kiss her sweet lips, lie with her, both of us dry-sweated from different sweats, mine law-office seersucker Blackstone calfskin sweat, hers the clean bathed housewife’s morning sweat. Kissing her mouth was kissing the day itself, the October sunlight and whiskey and Seven-Up on her lips and she herself in her mouth, her woman’s inside taste yet hers alone too, the special odd astringent chemistry of Mary Margaret Reilly’s own saliva.

  Love her? I’m not sure what words mean any more, but I loved her if loving her is wanting her all the time, wanting even the sight of her, and being away from her was like being short of breath, and seeing her, just catching sight of her at a distance, was a homecoming to a happy home and a rising of heart. Once I even laughed and clapped my hands when I turned into Belle Isle and saw her on the gallery. I felt like my ancestor Clayton Laughlin Lamar coming home from Virginia in 1865.

  Lucy I loved too, but Lucy was a dream, a slim brown dancer in a bell jar spinning round and round in the “Limelight” music of old gone Carolina long ago. Margot was life itself as if all Louisiana, its fecund oil-rich dark greens and haunted twilights, its very fakery and money-loving and comicalness, had all been gathered and fleshed out in one creature. It meant having her and not being haunted, holding all of goldgreen Louisiana in my arms. She was a big girl.

  Later we lived by sexual delights and the triumphs of architectural restoration. Truthfully, at that time I don’t know which she enjoyed more, a good piece in Henry Clay’s bed or Henry Clay’s bed. Once a couple of years ago when we were making love, I saw her arm stretch back in a way she had, but now not to grab the bedpost as a point of anchorage or leverage in the storm-tossed sea of love, to hold on for dear life—no, not at all: this time as her arm stretched up her fingers explored the fine oiled restored texture of the mahogany, her nails traced the delicate fluting of the heavy columns.

  Later than that, when I took to the bottle—a different love story—and became a poor lover, once again inattentive and haunted, she came to prefer restoration to love. Certain architectural triumphs became for her like orgasms, like the time she dug up a ninety-year-old plaster craftsman in Bunkie, Louisiana, when everybody had told her they had all died, she having discovered old accurate sketches of the plaster roses in the ceilings of the burned wing of Belle Isle. Her face glowed: bringing together the two, the sketches and the long-lost craftsman, and seeing the great shallow roses take form was, I saw, as good for her as sexual love, at the time better in fact.

  Then what happened between me and Margot?

  If she was here, I know what she’d say and she’d be right as far as she went: Instead of loving me, you crawled into a bottle and I just decided I’d be damned if I’d crawl in with you. You made your decision.

  But she’d also be partly wrong. The simple and amazing truth is that when she finished fixing up Belle Isle, she also somehow finished with me. The house Belle Isle was she herself, a Louisiana belle, and when she had done it over and done herself over just right and had finished with me, a proper Louisiana gent—after she had done us both, she was through with both. Once she’d done every conceivable bit of restoration, poring over old sketches, enlisting historians, importing Carrara marble carvers—once she was finished, we were finished—the only important thing for her was that everything had to be exactly as it was. Why? I asked her once. Why does everything have to be exactly as it was? She did me over too. She didn’t restore me exactly, she created me according to some Texas-conceived image of the River Road gentry, a kind of gentleman planter without plantation, a composite, I came to understand, of Ashley Wilkes (himself a creature of another woman of course, an anemic poetic Georgia gent), Leslie Howard (another anemic poetic gent), plus Jeff Davis home from the wars and set up in style by another strong-minded woman at Beauvoir, parked out in a pigeonnier much like mine, plus Gregory Peck, gentle Southern lawyer, plus a bit of Clark Gable as Rhett. She even bought my clothes. She liked me to wear linen suits.

  I went along agreeably, amused by her extraordinary Texas notion that we “aristocratic” folk were somehow all of a piece. Of course we were not, not even aristocratic, and since I never felt much of a piece myself, I’d as soon dress the part. I even found myself playing up to the role, pacing up and down, stopping now and then to make a legal note at my plantation desk in her Florentine-leather notepad, stopping at the cypress cupboard-turned-into-bar to pour a whiskey from crystal decanter into silver jigger, the way Southern gents do in the movies.

  Did you know that the South and for all I know the entire U.S.A. is full of demonic women who, driven by as yet unnamed furies, are desperately restoring and preserving places, buildings? Women married to fond indulgent easygoing somewhat lapsed men like me, who would as soon do one thing as another as long as they can go fishing, hunting, drink a bit, horse around, watch the Dolphins and Jack Nicklaus on TV. So here’s this fellow like me who maybe had a moment of glory in his youth, in football, in Phi Beta Kappa, as Grand Dragon of his fraternity, and now is managing Auto-Lec or Quik-Stop and every night comes home to a museum such as not even Geor
ge Washington slept in.

  So she finished the house and we found ourselves at a loss. What to do? We did what other well-off thirty-five-year-old couples did: went skiing in Aspen, house-partying, fishing and drinking on the Gulf Coast, house-partying and drinking in Highlands.

  But what to do then? What to do with time? Make love. Have a child. We did that. At least I thought we did that. But after she finished Belle Isle and named her child Siobhan, there was nothing to do. Siobhan was well looked after, especially when granddaddy Tex moved in with us.

  I could see her problem. Christ, what was she going to do? What to do with that Texas energy and her passion for making things either over or of a piece. What did God do after he finished creation? Christ, she didn’t know how to rest. At least in Louisiana we knew how to take things easy. We could always drink.

  That was when she revived her interest in the “performing arts” and went to Dallas-Arlington to study under Merlin.

  Did I love her? Why are you always asking about love? Have you been crossed up too? Isn’t your God’s love enough for you? Margot’s love was enough for me. I loved her sexually in such a way that I could not not touch her. My happiness was being with her. My old saturninity vanished. I hugged and kissed her in the street, necked in the car like white trash in the daytime, felt her up under the table in restaurants, and laughed like a boy to see her blush and knock my hand away and, looking anxiously around, revert to her old Texasese: “Git away from here! What you think you doing, boy!”

  There is no joy on this earth like falling in love with a woman and managing at the same time the trick of keeping just enough perspective to see her fall in love too, to see her begin to see you in a different way, to see her color change, eyes soften, her hand of itself reach for you. Your saints say, Yes but the love of God is even better, but Jesus how could this be so? Well? Your eyes go distant as if you were thinking of a time long ago. Does that mean that you are no longer a believer or that nowadays not even believers can understand such things? Doesn’t your own Jewish Bible say there is nothing under the sun like the way of a man with a maid?