Lancelot

observed.
    You were taking a shortcut through the cemetery. One of the women scrubbing the tombs stopped you to ask you something. Obviously she recognized you. You shook your head and moved on. But what could she have asked you? Only one thing under the circumstances. To say a prayer for the dead. An old custom here, particularly on All Souls’ Day. You turned her down.
    So something went wrong with you too. Or you wouldn’t be here serving as assistant chaplain or substitute psychiatrist or whatever it is you’re doing. A non-job. Are you in trouble? Is it a woman? Are you in love?
    Do you remember “falling in love,” “being in love”?
    There was a time when I thought that was the only thing that really mattered. No, there were two things and two times in my life.
    At first I thought “being in love” was the only thing. Holding a sweet Georgia girl in your arms and dancing to the “Limelight” theme in the Carolina mountains in the summer of ’52, out of doors, with the lightning bugs and the Japanese lanterns.
    Later I became coarser or perhaps more realistic. I began to wonder if there was such a thing as “being in love,” or whether the best things in life might not be such simple, age-old pleasures as ordinary sexual intercourse and ordinary drinking. Indeed, what could be finer than to be a grown healthy man and to meet a fine-looking woman you’ve never seen before and to want her on the spot and to see also that she likes you, to invite her to have a few drinks in a bar, to put your hand under her dress, to touch the deep white flesh of her thigh, to speak into her ear, “Well, now, sweetheart, what do you say?” Right? No?
    But that’s falling in love too, in a way, isn’t it? Yet very different. I wonder which is better. To tell you the truth. I haven’t quite sorted it out yet.
    But certainly “love” is one or the other, no doubt the latter. Sometimes I think we were the victims of a gigantic hoax by our elders, that there was an elaborate conspiracy to conceal from us the one simple fact that the only important, certainly the best thing in life, is ordinary sexual love.
    I “fell in love” with Lucy Cobb from Georgia and married her. Then she died. Then I “fell in love” with Margot and married her. She died too.
    Would it surprise you if I told you that I might be falling in love again? With the girl in the next room. I’ve never seen her. But they tell me she was gang-raped by some sailors in the Quarter, forced to commit unnatural acts many times, then beaten up and thrown onto the batture. She won’t speak to anybody. And she has to be force fed. Like me she prefers the solitude of her cell. But we communicate by tapping on the wall. It is strange. Her defilement restores her to a kind of innocence.
    Communication is simple when you are “in love.” Driving with Lucy Cobb through the Carolina summer night with the top down and the radio playing the “Limelight” theme, one could say to her simply:
    â€œI like that, don’t you?”
    And she could say: “Yes.”
    With the girl in the next room it is the same. Yesterday I tapped twice.
    She tapped back twice.
    It might have been an accident. On the other hand, it could have been a true communication. My heart beat as if I were falling in love for the first time.
    Then you know my story? I know it too of course, but I’m not sure how much I really remember. I think of it in terms of headlines: BELLE ISLE BURNS, BODIES OF FILM STARS CHARRED BEYOND RECOGNITION. SCION OF OLD FAMILY CRAZED BY GRIEF AND RAGE. SUFFERS BURNS TRYING TO SAVE WIFE . No doubt I read such headlines. I wonder why the headlines are easier to remember than the event itself.
    Now I’ve begun to remember some things perfectly. It was seeing you that did it.
    The first thing I remembered was the exact circumstances under which I discovered that my wife was deceiving me. But what did that have to do with you? Memory is a strange thing.
    The next thing I remembered made more sense. I remembered the first time I had seen you since childhood. You were sitting in the fraternity house alone, drinking and reading Verlaine. That made quite an impression on me. I remember wondering whether you were not trying to make an impression. What kind of an act is that, I wondered. (It was a bit of an act, wasn’t it?)
    Then this morning I