Lancelot

dance with her on a summer night, hold her lightly and look into her eyes. I wanted Margot’s sweet Texas ass and I wanted Lucy’s opaque Georgia eyes.
    This girl in the next cell is not a virgin. She was raped by three men in one night and then forced to perform fellatio on them.
    I’ve learned more about her. In fact, I managed to catch a glimpse of her chart while the nurses were off in the lounge drinking coffee. She is twenty-nine and comes, like Lucy, from Georgia. She dropped out of Agnes Scott, a fine young-ladies’ school, and went to live in an artists’ community in La Jolla. The standard boring story of our times. Then, thinking better of it, of California and the New Life (which of course is not a new life at all but the last spasm of the old, the logical and inevitable culmination, the very caricature of the old, the new life being nothing more or less than what their parents would do if they dared), she removed to the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, lived in Desire project, offered herself up in service to mankind. Whereupon mankind took her up on her offer, raped her for her pains, and left her for dead in the Quarter.
    Then how is she like Lucy? How is she the Lucy of the new world? Is it because the violation she suffered has in some sense restored her virginity, much as a person recovering from the plague is immune to the plague? I don’t quite know why she is so much like Lucy except that I want the same thing of her I wanted from Lucy: to come close but keep a little distance between us, to ask the simplest questions in a new language— How are you —just to hear the sound of her voice, to touch the tips of her fingers, to hand her through an open door ahead of me, my hand pressed lightly against the small of her back. The night of the day I discovered Margot’s infidelity, I left my old life path, became sober for the first time in years, bathed, shaved, dressed in clean clothes, and spent the night wide awake and watchful in my plantation rocker placed at such an angle that, looking through a window and the one clear pane of glass in the stained-glass door Margot had sure enough found for me (the final camp touch which Margot said would make the pigeonnier a charming little place and it did), I could see Belle Isle and most of the private drive.
    My supper companions had left for the Holiday Inn about eleven o’clock to view the week’s rushes. That took no more than an hour, but afterwards they often got carried away by discussion, “more like knock-down-drag-out-argument,” said Margot, which went on till one or two in the morning.
    How long would the knock-down-drag-out argument last that night, I wondered and, instead of drinking myself to sleep, stayed up to see.
    She did not come home at all.
    Or rather her Country Squire wagon, she alone in it, turned into the driveway at 8:30 the next morning, rolling so slowly that it hardly made a crunch in the pea gravel. As punctually as Kant setting out for the university at exactly six o’clock so that shopkeepers along the way could set their watches by him, it had been my custom to arise at exactly nine o’clock, stagger to a cold shower, and, of late, take a drink. At exactly 9:37 (two minutes after the news) I would take my seat at the breakfast table at Belle Isle. At 10:15 I was at my office, helping Negroes in the sixties, handling old ladies’ estates in the seventies.
    That morning I sat in my plantation rocker, sober and clear-headed, and rocked for a while.
    I sat down to breakfast at the usual time, Margot ate heartily, elbows on table, wiry head bent over steaming scrambled eggs. My hand shook slightly as I drank coffee; my stomach shrank as if braced against the first hot bourbon of the day.
    â€œHow were the rushes?”
    â€œOh. Christ. One abortion after another. The bloody color was off again. Bob was beside himself.”
    Now bloody was the word. Merlin was not really English but lived there long enough so that everything was bloody this and bloody that.
    In my new sobriety things were better and worse. My senses were acute, too acute. I became aware of the warp and woof of the tablecloth. My eyes followed one linen thread under and over, under and over. I noticed flecks of white porcelain showing through the worn gold leaf on the rim of the coffee cup where the lips touched it ninety degrees away from the handle. When Elgin touched me to see if I wanted more