Lancelot

instead of crossing to the stairs. I turned left into the dark parlor next to the dining room, from which it was separated by sliding oak doors. A few minutes earlier I had noticed that the door was open some six inches. It was possible, standing with my back against the door, to hear the diners and by moving from side to side to see their reflection in the dim pier mirror on the opposite wall. The images traveled some fifty feet, thirty feet from diner to mirror, twenty feet back to me. Lucy, my daughter, was at one end of the table. Even from this distance it was possible to see in the small blur of her face how like and unlike her mother she is, Lucy, my first wife. There is the same little lift and lilt when she moves her head but the features are both grosser and more gorgeous, like a Carolina wildflower transplanted to the Louisiana tropics. For her, Lucy. Belle Isle was no more than a place to stay. We were not close. She and Margot didn’t like each other much. My son? I had not seen my son since he quit college and went to live in a streetcar behind the car barn.
    Presently Lucy left.
    Margot, Merlin, and Dana talked. There was the sound in their voices of my not being there.
    Two small events occurred.
    Margot leaned over Merlin to say something to Raine I could not hear, her hair brushing past his face. When Margot spoke, she had a way of swaying against her listener, so that her shoulder and arm touched him. He leaned back, absently, politely, to make room, but as her shoulder rose—is her hand propped on his knee? he took a mock bite of the bare brown flesh at his mouth, not really a bite; he set his teeth on the skin. So perfunctory an act it was, he hardly seemed aware of doing it. His fixed blue gaze did not shift.
    â€œOkay,” said Merlin presently. “So we’ll use the pigeonnier for Raine and Dana’s fight. I agree. The checkerboard lighting pattern would be much more effective than a slave cabin. Still, I like—”
    â€œWhat about Rudy?” Dana asked, I think he asked. Rudy? What was Rudy? Did he say Rudy? I don’t think he said Rudy.
    No one seemed to be listening.
    â€œWhat?” said Merlin after a minute.
    Raine bobbed her head to and fro, propping and unpropping her cheek with her finger, hair falling away. She was humming a tune.
    Again Margot leaned across Merlin to answer. I could not hear.
    I could hear my absence in Raine’s voice. She was different. There had grown up between us a kind of joking flirtation. She was Dana’s girl, of course. But I could tell her how beautiful she was (she was) and unbend enough to kiss her when we met, kiss on the mouth the way they all do. She could tell me how beautiful I was (am I?). When we were in a room with people, there existed a joking agreement between us that she would be attentive to me, would not turn her back even if she is talking to someone else. It was as if we pretended to be married and jealous of each other. But now without me she was different.
    Rudy? Who is Rudy? Me? Why Rudy?
    Raine was humming a tune, or rather making as if she were humming a tune, a child’s head-bobbing tune, as if it were a signal.
    Was the tune “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”?
    Is that because I drink and sometimes have a red nose?
    Is it because Rudolph had antlers?
    Did Dana say Rudy? Actually I do not really think he did.
    How strange it is that a discovery like this, of evil, of a kinsman’s dishonesty, a wife’s infidelity, can shake you up, knock you out of your rut, be the occasion of a new way of looking at things!
    In the space of one evening I had made the two most important discoveries of my life. I discovered my wife’s infidelity and five hours later I discovered my own life. I saw it and myself clearly for the first time.
    Can good come from evil? Have you ever considered the possibility that one might undertake a search not for God but for evil? You people may have been on the wrong track all these years with all that talk about God and signs of his existence, the order and beauty of the universe—that’s all washed up and you know it. The more we know about the beauty and order of the universe, the less God has to do with it. I mean, who cares about such things as the Great Watchmaker?
    But what if you could show me a sin? a purely evil deed, an intolerable deed for which there is no explanation? Now there’s a mystery. People would sit up and take notice.