Lancelot

amazement.
    â€œOkay. You recall the other day we were speaking about the chimney hole and the dumbwaiter?”
    â€œYes.” All ears now.
    â€œAll right. Look.” Taking his log from the clipboard, I turned it over and began to draw a floor plan. “I’m making two assumptions. One is that they’ll move back into Belle Isle when they leave the motel tomorrow. There’s nowhere else to go.”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œThen I’m assuming they’ll move back into the same rooms at Belle Isle they had before.”
    â€œYes. They left their clothes there.”
    â€œMerlin here on one side of the chimney, Jacoby here on the other. But Margot’s and Lucy’s, Dana’s and Raine’s rooms are across the hall. That presents a technical problem.”
    â€œTechnical problem?”
    â€œTell me something, Elgin. How would you like to make a movie?”
    â€œMovie? What kind of movie?”
    â€œA new kind of cinéma vérité.” I picked up the pencil. “Here’s where you can help me. There are a few technical problems.”
    Christ, here’s my discovery. You have got hold of the wrong absolutes and infinities. God as absolute? God as infinity? I don’t even understand the words. I’ll tell you what’s absolute and infinite. Loving a woman. But how would you know? You see, your church knows what it’s doing: rule out one absolute so you have to look for another.
    Do you know what it’s like to be a self-centered not unhappy man who leads a tolerable finite life, works, eats, drinks, hunts, sleeps, then one fine day discovers that the great starry heavens have opened to him and that his heart is bursting with it. It? She. Her. Woman. Not a category, not a sex, not one of two sexes, a human female creature, but an infinity.. What else is infinity but a woman become meat and drink to you, life and your heart’s own music, the air you breathe? Just to be near her is to live and have your soul’s own self. Just to open your mouth on the skin of her back. What joy just to wake up with her beside you in the morning. I didn’t know there was such happiness.
    But there is the dark converse: not having her is not breathing. I’m not kidding: I couldn’t get my breath without her.
    What else is man made for but this? I can see you agree about love but you look somewhat ironic. Are we talking about two different things? In any case, there’s a catch. Love is infinite happiness. Losing it is infinite unhappiness.
    So far so good, you say, somewhat ironically, I notice. A man falls in love with a lovely lusty woman, so what else is new? But can you imagine what it’s like to love a lovely lustful woman who lusts but not for you?
    Quite a discovery.
    The truth is, it never crossed my mind in my entire sweet Southern life that there was such a thing as a lustful woman. Another infinite imponderable. Infinitely appalling. What hath God wrought?
    On the other hand, why should not a woman, who is after all a creature like any other, be lustful? Yet to me, the sight of a lustful woman was as incredible as a fire-breathing dragon turning up at the Rotary Club.
    What I really mean of course was that what horrified me was the discovery of the possibility that she might lust for someone not me.
    But of course I had to make sure of it. Love and lust should not be a matter of speculation.
    Margot, it turned out, was indeed sick the morning after Elgin’s stakeout. Pale and feverish.
    Then perhaps she had simply got sick and been cared for by Merlin and Jacoby. Why is it so hard to make certain of a simple thing?
    Margot was sick! Hurray.
    Yes, but I was not Siobhan’s father and Merlin could be and Merlin was here.
    My God, why was I torturing myself?
    â€œWhen did it come on, Margot?” I asked her, going to her room after breakfast.
    â€œGod, I damned near fainted during the rushes. I think I did faint later. Out cold. I just barely managed to drag myself home.”
    Can one ever be sure of anything? Did my mother go for innocent joyrides with Uncle Harry, take the air, and see the sights as they said, or did they take the lap robe and head for the woods or a tourist cabin, one of those little pre-motel miniature houses set up on four cinderblocks with a bed, linoleum, gas heater, and tin shower, the essentials.
    What does that sorrowful look of yours mean? And what if they did, would it be so bad, is