Lancelot

an occasion of intimacy between us. I felt it too. Things were understood and unspoken between us. It went without saying for example that actors are dumbbells. Not even Margot followed us when he spoke of Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” and Hemingway’s nastiness to Fitzgerald.
    It was as if we were old hands at something or other. But at what? Why should there be a bond between us? But he listened with total attentiveness, leaning across to me over his folded brown arms. He was lean and fit and old, muscular, thick-chested, heavy shock of yellowed gray hair curling over one eye. He had emphysema, I think: his neck ligaments held his chest up like a barrel. No sign of considerable age except the white hairs sprouting over the zipper of his jump suit and the white fiber around his blue iris.
    Margot had a triumphant night, I remember. They were worried about the “second unit” falling behind schedule. The second unit was supposed to shoot a scene, the opening scene of the film in fact, a flashback where the young son comes home from Heidelberg, steps off the steamboat at the plantation landing. They had rented a steamboat (a New Orleans excursion boat), found a landing in Grand Gulf, but the current was wrong and the boat could not warp into a landing. Days had been wasted, thousands spent.
    â€œThe board is four days out,” said Margot severely. The “board” was actually a board with paper chits stuck onto it like a calendar, showing the exact sequence of scenes to be shot. About Margot there was very much the sense of being a team member. She was in fact Merlin’s “executive assistant.”
    What to do? Build another landing in a place with less current? More time, more money. Raine and Dana couldn’t care less. Lacy, my daughter, didn’t even hear. She was looking at Raine as usual, mouth slightly open.
    Margot knitted her brows and drummed all ten fingers furiously on the table. “Jesus, we can’t lose another day.” She even enjoyed the hassles.
    Margot saved the day. In fact her triumph was complete.
    She snapped her fingers. “Hold it!” she said to no one in particular. “Just hold it. I may have an idea. Let me make one phone call.”
    When she returned, she was flushed with pleasure and excitement, but she kept her voice offhand. “What about this, Bobby?” she asked Merlin, stretching up her arms and yawning. When she stretched up her arms like that, her completely smooth axillae flattened and showed two wavelets of muscle.
    She had remembered there was a steamboat on False River, a cut-off backwater of the Mississippi. “It’s small, almost a miniature, but so are the landings there. And there’s no current. What we could do is a long shot of the boat coming into the Dernier landing, which is tiny, of a scale with the boat. I know the Derniers well. What’s more, the Dernier house even looks like a miniature Belle Isle. You could cut to the roofline over the levee and no one could tell the difference.”
    Merlin thought about it. He nodded. “We’ll go with that,” he said casually, almost curtly, without looking at her. She could have been a pool secretary. “Okay. Call Jacoby.”
    It was the businesslikeness of course which pleased her so much. Now she was not only one of them but a valued one.
    When she was happy or excited, her freckles turned plum-colored. Her pigment darkened with the moon. I could gauge her sexual desire by her freckles.
    Then surely my “discovery” was wrong. She was as happy as a child, so happy she reached over and hugged me, not Merlin. Merlin paid no attention to her. His white-rimmed blue eye engaged mine as usual. He wanted to talk about an article of mine, really no more than a note, about an obscure Civil War skirmish in these parts, published in the Louisiana Historical Journal. He had taken the trouble to look it up.
    As usual I was first to leave the table. It was my custom (all of a sudden I realized how much of my life had become a custom) to leave them to their movie talk, pay a visit to Siobhan and Tex, and arrive at my pigeonnier in time for the ten o’clock news. It had become important to me in recent years to hear the news every hour—though nothing of importance had happened for years. What did I expect to happen?
    But this time I did something different. I left the worn path of my life. Once out of sight,