Lancelot

said: I’ve got something sweet for you, old boy, the sweetest something you’ll ever have but hold it a minute while I look at this old key. She had a passion for old “authentic” things. Texas must have everything but old things.
    She was right, she had something sweet and she knew as only a woman can know, with absolute certitude, that she had me, that through some odd coming together of time and place and circumstance and her equally odd mixture of calculation, drollness, and her cool-fleshed hot like of me—oh yes, she wanted me as well as my house—she infallibly knew where the vector of desire converged, the warm cottoned-off place between her legs, the sheer negativity and want and lack where the well-fitted cotton dipped and went away. I kissed the cotton there.
    We drank and laughed at the joy of the time and the discovery: that we each had what the other wanted, not exactly “love” as the word is used, but her new ten million and my old house, her sweet West Texas self and my just as sweet Louisiana Anglo-Saxon aristocracy gone to pot, well-born English lord Sterling Hayden gone to seed in Macao. It was like a rare royal betrothal, where the betrothed like each other as well. Like? Love. Laugh and shout with joy at the happiness between them.
    Her calculation and cool casting ahead delighted me. As her thigh lay across me, it seemed to be sentient of itself, assigned as it was the task of fathoming the life beneath it, and even as we kissed her eyes were agleam and not quite closed as she took in the pigeonnier. big enough for a thousand pigeons or one man. An “architectural gem” she called it.
    But what is love? I thought even then. For by your dear sweet Jesus I did love her there for her droll mercinariness and between her sweet legs and in her mouth and her splendid deep strong runneled back sinking dizzily into a narrow solid waist before it flared into the loveliest ass in all West Texas, but loved as well her droll direct Texas way and even her quickness in overlaying it with Dallas acting-school lingo. New Orleans uptown talk, and God knew what else.
    At heart she was a collector, preserver, restorer, transformer; even me and herself she transformed: to take an old neglected abused thing, save it, restore it, put it to new and charming use. She loved to drink, laugh, and make love, but almost as well, better maybe, and orgasmically too, she liked cleaning away a hundred years of pigeon shit and finding lovely oiled-with-guano cypress underneath, turning a dovecote into a study, me into Jefferson Davis writing his memoirs. She was a Texas magician.
    It was different from being “in love.” I was “in love” with Lucy Cobb, my first wife.
    The first time I saw Lucy Cobb: on the tennis court at Highlands, North Carolina, I the Louisiana outlander and ill-at-ease among the easy ingrown Georgians and Carolinians, not knowing them or quite how to dress and so dressed up wrong in coat and tie in late afternoon and standing off a ways under a tree, hands in pockets watching the tennis players, and thinking despite myself: What a shame you all don’t know who I am, for in Louisiana people would, Louisiana being what it is, a small American Creole republic valuing sports, fistfights, cockfights, contests, shootouts, Gunsmoke. winning, and above all, football, and there I was in what turned out to be the high tide of my life what with being chosen Athlete of the Year by Y.M.B.C. and Rhodes scholar besides, like Whizzer White, which latter contributed nothing to my fame except a storied exotic detail (“… and he’s smart too!”)—the South a very big place after all and the rough camaraderie of Louisiana not necessarily working here in the muted manners of the east South, where people seemed to come and go, meet and part by agreed-upon but unspoken rules. I was famous in Louisiana, as famous as the Governor, and for one reason alone: running 110 yards against mighty Alabama, and unknown in Carolina.
    Lucy’s smooth thin brown legs scissored and flashed under her white skirt. When she hit the ball, she got her body into it, shoulders, back, and even a final flex of pelvis. She must have played tennis all her life. Decorous as she stood talking, lounged at the net, laughed, spun her racket, eyes cast down, when she served, her body arched back, then in full reach stretched, then flexed and swung in mock-erotic abandon.