Lancelot

whatever, in both its infinite good and its infinite evil. That is sexual behavior. The orgasm is the only earthly infinity. Therefore it is either an infinite good or an infinite evil.
    My quest was for a true sin—was there such a thing? Sexual sin was the unholy grail I sought.
    It is possible of course that there is no such thing and that a true sin, like the Grail, probably does not exist.
    Yet I had the feeling I was on to something, perhaps for the first time in my life. Or at least for twenty years. I was like Robinson Crusoe seeing a footprint on his island after twenty years: Not a footprint but my daughter’s blood type. Aha, there is something going on!
    So overnight I became sober, clear-eyed, clean, fit, alert, watchful as a tiger at a water hole.
    Something was stirring. So Sir Lancelot set out, looking for something rarer than the Grail. A sin.
    â€œElgin, how would you like to make a movie?”
    Elgin smiled. “Merlin axed me already.”
    â€œTo be in one. I’m asking about making a movie, not Merlin’s. Mine. I’m going to make a movie.”
    â€œYou are?”
    â€œAnd you’re going to help me.”
    â€œI am?”
    â€œElgin, listen.” I walked around the plantation desk and stood hands in pockets looking down at him. He sat perfectly symmetrical, arms resting at an angle across chair arms, fingers laced, gazing straight ahead, a slight smile on his lips. “I’m asking a favor of you. I need someone to help me and only you can do it. There are two reasons for this. One is that only you have the technical ability to help me. The other is that you are one of the two or three people in the world I trust. The others are probably your mother and father. I must tell you that it is a large favor because you will be doing it without knowing why. Although what I’m asking you to do is not illegal, it is just as well you don’t know the reasons. Do you understand?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWell?”
    â€œOkay.” Still avoiding my eye, he answered immediately. It was as if he already knew what I wanted.
    â€œHere’s the technical problem. To tell you the truth, I don’t know whether it can be solved. Certainly I have no idea of how to go about it.” I took out my floor plan of Belle Isle’s second story. “You see these five rooms? Margot’s and Raine’s on one side of the hall, separated by the chimney and dumb-waiter. On the other side of the hall are these three rooms, Troy Dana’s here. Merlin’s here, Janos Jacoby’s here. They’ll be moving back to the house tomorrow as I had anticipated.”
    Elgin’s eyelids flickered once, when I mentioned Margot’s name. Otherwise his expression did not change.
    Elgin didn’t move, but his eyes went out of focus.
    â€œNow here’s what I want. I want a hidden camera mounted in each room and the events which occur in the room between midnight and five o’clock recorded. For one, perhaps two nights. Three nights at the most.”
    â€œNo way,” he said at last.
    But even as he said it, shaking his head and smiling, he was casting about in his mind—happily. Happy the man who can live with problems! It was this I had counted on of course, that the problem, its sheer impossibility, would engage him immediately so that he would not think two seconds about what I was asking him to do.
    Even as he smiled and shook his head, he was casting about. It was the challenge of the thing. He was like a mountain climber, pitoned, rappeled, looking straight up a sheer cliff. It couldn’t be climbed. On the other hand, perhaps—
    â€œNo way.” He repeated the impossibility, savored it.
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œAt least three reasons. Not enough light. Camera noise. And no camera will run five hours.”
    â€œI see.” I waited, watching him thumb his glasses up his nose bridge, scratch his head.
    An odd thought: I remember thinking at the time that nothing really changes, not even Elgin going from pickaninny to M.I.T. smart boy. For you see, even in doing that and not in casting about for the technical solution, he was still in a sense “my nigger”; and my watching him, waiting for him, was piece and part of the old way we had of ascribing wondrous powers to “them,” if they were “ours.” Don’t you remember how my grandfather used to say of old Fluker, Ellis’s