Lancelot

restoration, poring over old sketches, enlisting historians, importing Carrara marble carvers—once she was finished, we were finished—the only important thing for her was that everything had to be exactly as it was. Why? I asked her once. Why does everything have to be exactly as it was? She did me over too. She didn’t restore me exactly, she created me according to some Texas-conceived image of the River Road gentry, a kind of gentleman planter without plantation, a composite, I came to understand, of Ashley Wilkes (himself a creature of another woman of course, an anemic poetic Georgia gent), Leslie Howard (another anemic poetic gent), plus Jeff Davis home from the wars and set up in style by another strong-minded woman at Beauvoir, parked out in a pigeonnier much like mine, plus Gregory Peck, gentle Southern lawyer, plus a bit of Clark Gable as Rhett. She even bought my clothes. She liked me to wear linen suits.
    I went along agreeably, amused by her extraordinary Texas notion that we “aristocratic” folk were somehow all of a piece. Of course we were not, not even aristocratic, and since I never felt much of a piece myself, I’d as soon dress the part. I even found myself playing up to the role, pacing up and down, stopping now and then to make a legal note at my plantation desk in her Florentine-leather notepad, stopping at the cypress cupboard-turned-into-bar to pour a whiskey from crystal decanter into silver jigger, the way Southern gents do in the movies.
    Did you know that the South and for all I know the entire U.S.A. is full of demonic women who, driven by as yet unnamed furies, are desperately restoring and preserving places, buildings? Women married to fond indulgent easygoing somewhat lapsed men like me, who would as soon do one thing as another as long as they can go fishing, hunting, drink a bit, horse around, watch the Dolphins and Jack Nicklaus on TV. So here’s this fellow like me who maybe had a moment of glory in his youth, in football, in Phi Beta Kappa, as Grand Dragon of his fraternity, and now is managing Auto-Lec or Quik-Stop and every night comes home to a museum such as not even George Washington slept in.
    So she finished the house and we found ourselves at a loss. What to do? We did what other well-off thirty-five-year-old couples did: went skiing in Aspen, house-partying, fishing and drinking on the Gulf Coast, house-partying and drinking in Highlands.
    But what to do then? What to do with time? Make love. Have a child. We did that. At least I thought we did that. But after she finished Belle Isle and named her child Siobhan, there was nothing to do. Siobhan was well looked after, especially when granddaddy Tex moved in with us.
    I could see her problem. Christ, what was she going to do? What to do with that Texas energy and her passion for making things either over or of a piece. What did God do after he finished creation? Christ, she didn’t know how to rest. At least in Louisiana we knew how to take things easy. We could always drink.
    That was when she revived her interest in the “performing arts” and went to Dallas-Arlington to study under Merlin.
    Did I love her? Why are you always asking about love? Have you been crossed up too? Isn’t your God’s love enough for you? Margot’s love was enough for me. I loved her sexually in such a way that I could not not touch her. My happiness was being with her. My old saturninity vanished. I hugged and kissed her in the street, necked in the car like white trash in the daytime, felt her up under the table in restaurants, and laughed like a boy to see her blush and knock my hand away and, looking anxiously around, revert to her old Texasese: “Git away from here! What you think you doing, boy!”
    There is no joy on this earth like falling in love with a woman and managing at the same time the trick of keeping just enough perspective to see her fall in love too, to see her begin to see you in a different way, to see her color change, eyes soften, her hand of itself reach for you. Your saints say, Yes but the love of God is even better, but Jesus how could this be so? Well? Your eyes go distant as if you were thinking of a time long ago. Does that mean that you are no longer a believer or that nowadays not even believers can understand such things? Doesn’t your own Jewish Bible say there is nothing under the sun like the way of a man with a maid?
    And there is no pain on