Lancelot

the balconies but the area around the pool is fairly dark.”
    â€œLounges and chairs around here?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œScrubs—that is, shrubbery around here?”
    â€œYes.” Ellis, his father, used to say scrubs for shrubs : “You want me to cut them scrubs?” Not even Ellis says that any more.
    â€œThen there’s only one place.” Elgin dropped his pencil with a clatter, picked it up. made a big X, dropped it again, sat back. He smiled. His eyelids lowered. He’d made a breakthrough!
    â€œThe middle of the court?”
    â€œSure. Where else?”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œWhat kind of lounge chairs they got?”
    â€œWhat kind?”
    â€œI mean light aluminum or those heavy wooden ones?”
    â€œRedwood, heavy, black webbing. Too heavy to steal, I remember. Lock is proud of them.”
    Again Elgin smiled his old brilliant sweet smile. In his triumph he permitted himself to be what he was: a twenty-two-year-old Southern youth who smiled and laughed a great deal. “It’s dark here you say. The lounges are dark, the webbing is black. I’ll wear black swim trunks and man can’t nobody see nothing.”
    I smiled. He wasn’t even burlesquing himself as black or Southern black but as TV-Hollywood-Sammy-Davis-Junior black and he knew that I knew it.
    He snapped his fingers. “No. It’s even better than that.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œDon’t you see? It wouldn’t matter if anyone saw me at that distance. A man in trunks by the pool. Nobody would pay the slightest attention. Like Poe’s Purloined Letter .”
    Poe’s Purloined Letter. I thought about J. B. Jenkins, bad man, good man, bad good man, Kluxer, Christian, tackle, and comrade at arms against Alabama’s mighty Crimson Tide. The only Poe he knew was Alcide “Coonass” Poe, tailback from De Ridder. J. B. and I, sunk in life, soaked in old Louisiana blood and tears and three hundred years of Christian sin and broadsword Bowie-knife Sharps-rifle bloodshed and victory-defeat. And Elgin leapfrogging us all, transformed overnight into snotty-cool Yankee professor.
    Poe’s Purloined Letter indeed. Poe. He too had got onto Elgin’s secret: Find happiness in problems and puzzles and mathematical gold bugs. But he let go of it. Went nutty like me. Elgin wouldn’t.
    â€œHow are you going to get the binoculars out there?”
    â€œWrapped in my towel.”
    â€œOkay. Then the location of the room doesn’t matter. Go on out there now and register. Keep your log tonight. When you get back, get some sleep and meet me here about this time tomorrow. I’ll put Fluker on guide duty.”
    â€œFluker.” Again we laughed. “No telling what Fluker gon say.”
    â€œHe’ll do fine. Anyhow, what difference does it make?”
    â€œYeah.” Elgin was casting ahead again. “How to see to write in the dark is the thing. White pencil on black? Pencil light? No, what I’m going to use”—clearly he was talking to himself—“is a Kiefer blacklight stylus.”
    â€œYou do that.”

5
    JACOBY? I HAVEN’T TOLD you about him? The headlines? BELLE ISLE BURNS! DIRECTOR MURDERED AND MUTILATED! EX-GRID STAR HELD FOR QUESTIONING! Yes, I remember all that. Belle Isle burned to the ground except for twenty snaggle-toothed Doric columns. My hands burned trying to save Margot.
    It is difficult to think about all that.
    You must believe me when I tell you that it is the banality of the past which puts me off. There is only one reason I am telling you about these old sad things, or rather trying to remember them, and it has nothing to do with not being able to remember. I can remember. I can remember every word Elgin said to me in the pigeonnier. It is because the past, any past, is intolerable, not because it is violent or terrible or doomstruck or any such thing, but just because it is so goddamn banal and feckless and useless. And violence is the most banal and boring of all. It is horrible not because it is bloody but because it is meaningless. It does not signify.
    Then why bother to tell you? Because something is bothering me and I won’t know what it is until I say it. Presently I’m going to ask you a question. Not that you will be able to answer it. But it is important that I ask it. That was always the best thing about you, that you were the only person I could ever talk