Lancelot

temples.
    â€œYou must be the master.”
    â€œWhat’s that? Eh?”—I must have said, or something as stupid. All I remember is standing holding my briefcase, too dumb to come out of the rain.
    â€œAren’t you the master of Belle Isle?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou must be Lancelot Lamar.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œYou don’t look like I expected”—bouncing and ducking like a thirteen-year-old yet really she was post-debutante, post-belle, twenty-three or -four.
    â€œWhat did you expect?”
    â€œA rumpled Sid Blackmer or maybe a whining Hank Jones.” They turned out to be actors and it turned out she knew them or said she did. I never heard of them and nowadays don’t know one actor from another.
    â€œWho are they?”
    â€œYou look more like an ugly Sterling Hayden, a mean Southern black-haired Sterling Hayden in seersuckers.”
    â€œWho is he?”
    â€œSterling Hayden gone to seed and running a sailor’s bar in Macao.”
    â€œHe sounds charming.” It wasn’t raining hard but I stepped onto the gallery to get out of it. “And you are charming. But I am hot and tired and need a drink. I think I’ll go through the house.”
    â€œI’m wet and cold and need a drink too.”
    I looked at her. She wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t Scarlett (the other belles were trying to be Scarlett, hoyden smile and so forth, were also unpretty, were, in fact, dogs, what is more, wet dogs …). Her face was shiny and foreshortened—was it the way she tilted her head back to push herself off the wall?—her mouth too wide. Dry, her coarse stiff hair invited the hand to squeeze it to test its spring (how I loved later to take hold of that hair in both hands, grab it by the roots in both fists, and rattle her skull with a surprising joking violence). Raindrops sprang away from it. Her hands were big. As she spoke her name we shook hands for some reason; her hand, coming from behind her, was plaster-pitted and big and warm. The second time we met, at the Azalea Festival reception in New Orleans (I had to go in to get my check for their use of Belle Isle), we shook hands again, and as her hand clasped mine, her forefinger tickled my palm. I was startled. “Does that mean the same thing in Texas that it does in Louisiana?” I asked her. She looked puzzled. As it turned out, it didn’t. Her neck was slender, round, and vulnerable but her back was strong and runneled. I’m getting ahead of myself. But what she was or had and what I caught a glimpse of and made me swallow was a curious droll direct voluptuousness, the boyishness being just a joke after all when it came to her looking straight at me. I noticed that her freckles turned plum-colored in the damp and bruised skin under the eye. At the time I didn’t know what her darkening freckles meant. Yet I sensed that her freckles were part of the joke and the voluptuousness.
    How strange love is! I think I loved you for equally curious reasons: that for all your saturninity, drinking, and horniness, there was something gracile and frail and feminine about you. Sometimes I wanted to grab you and hug those skinny bones—does that shock you? I did hold your arm a lot at first just to feel how thin you were. Later we never touched each other. Perhaps we were too close.
    She hugged her bare shoulders and shivered. “I said I could use a drink too.”
    I thought a moment.
    â€œMy God, what a frown. What lip biting! You look like you’re about to address a jury. I like the way you bite your lip when you think.”
    â€œIs that right?”
    â€œYes, that’s right.”
    â€œCome on.” I think I actually took her by the hand. I wanted to hold that warm, pitted hand again! At any rate, it came to pass that for the second or third time in my life, I left life’s familiar path—I being a creature of habit even then, doing the same thing day in and day out—took her by one hand, picked up the briefcase with the other, and went back down the service drive and across to the pigeonnier, the farthest place from the tourists, servants, and family, nobody but Ellis using it to store garden tools, and invited her in. Of course it wasn’t fixed up then and was dusty and cluttered but dry and pleasant.
    â€œWarm! Dry!” She clapped her hands as I cleared a place among the tools and found an old glider