Lancelot

soap opera.
    Next follows catastrophe of some sort. I can feel it in my bones. Perhaps it has already happened. Has it? Have you noticed anything unusual on the “outside”? I’ve noticed that the doctors and guards and attendants here who are supposed to be healthy—we’re the sick ones—seem depressed, anxious, gloomy, as if something awful had already happened. Has it?
    Catastrophe then—yes, I am sure of it—whether it has happened or not; whether by war, bomb, fire, or just decline and fall. Most people will die or exist as the living dead. Everything will go back to the desert.
    Do you believe that dreams can foretell the future? After all, your Bible speaks of it. I used not to, but I had a dream the other night and I cannot forget it. It was not about Belle Isle or my past life at all but about my future life. I’m sure of it. I was living in an abandoned house in a desert place, a ghost town which looked like one of those outlying Los Angeles neighborhoods Raymond Chandler describes.
    I was in a room and strangely immobilized. I don’t know why but I could not move. Outside there were trees and other houses and cars but nothing moved. There was perfect quiet. Yet I was not alone in the house. There was someone else in the next room. A woman. There was the unmistakable sense of her presence. How did I know it was a woman? I cannot tell you except that I knew. Perhaps it was the way she moved around the room. Do you know the way a woman moves around a room whether she is cleaning it or just passing time? It is different from the way a man moves. She is at home in a room. The room is an extension of her.
    She came out of the house. We were having a picnic, sitting on the tailgate of a truck. It was not the desert now. The land plunged almost straight down into the blue ocean. A breeze had sprung up and there was a tinkle of wind chimes. We had been working hard and were very hungry. We ate in silence, looking at each other. There was much to be done. We were making a new life. It was not the Old West and there was no frontier but we were making a new life, starting from scratch. There was no thought of “romance” or “sex” but only of making a new life. We knew what we were doing.
    The New Woman is the survivor of the catastrophe and the death of old worlds—like the woman in the next room. The worst thing that can happen to her has happened. The worst thing that can happen to me has happened. We are both survivors.
    What do survivors do?
    Knock.
    But she does not reply. Perhaps she did not survive. I’m surer of the catastrophe than I am of her survival.

3
    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.