Lancelot

because seeing you reminded me of the pigeonnier?
    But let me ask you seriously: Why is it such an unspeakable thing for one creature to obtrude a small portion of its body into the body of another creature? Is it not in fact a trivial matter when one puts it that way? I don’t think women attach too much importance to it.
    But suppose I put it another way. Isn’t it unspeakable to me to imagine Margot lying under another man, her head turning to and fro in a way I knew only too well, her lips stretched, a little mew-cry escaping her lips? Isn’t that unspeakable? Yes. But why? When I imagined other things happening to Margot, even the worst things, they were painful but not intolerable: Margot seriously ill, Margot hurt in an accident, Margot stealing money, even Margot dead, murdered. The thought of Margot dead was painful but not intolerable. But Margot under another man …
    Hm. Do you think it is only our generation who put so much stock in it, the sexual connection, or as the kids say, got hung up? The ancients didn’t seem to dwell on it too much; even the Bible is rather casual. Your God seemed much more jealous of false idols, golden calves, than his people messing around with each other. Perhaps God’s jealousy is different from ours. I wouldn’t have minded Margot kneeling before a Buddha. Then why should I worry about a small matter like Margot taking a small part of Merlin’s body into her body? As a physician, wouldn’t you say that nothing more is involved than the touch of one membrane against another? Cells touching cells.
    Not even your church took it very seriously until recent years. Dante was downright indulgent with sexual sinners. They occupied a rather pleasant anteroom to hell.
    And the present generation! Sex doesn’t even seem to rate among the Top Ten experiences. I remember once I visited my son. He got out of bed, where he and his girl friend were lying naked and twined about each other, yawned, threw a sheet over her, then proceeded to tell me what was really on his mind: a guitar. A guitar! A certain kind of guitar. Oh, Christ, if only he could afford that guitar! Maybe I was good for four hundred dollars? As I wrote him a check I remember thinking: Very well, he lusts after, loves that guitar. But once he got it, would he mind somebody else playing it? Perhaps. But he wouldn’t find it unspeakable.
    My son got enough of women before he was twenty. Presently he appears to be a mild homosexual. But in either case, hetero or homo, it doesn’t seem to count for a great deal to him.
    Is it just our generation which got hung up on it?
    You shrug and cock an eye at the cemetery.
    Then is it just me?
    I remember where I first discovered her adultery. In the room under the pigeonnier. Do you remember that room? You and I used to sit there on weekends or in the summer and drink and read aloud—you mostly—the dirty parts of Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer . That was a discovery for me too: that there were not only bad dirty books and great clean books but also great dirty books (yes! that’s the connection: two discoveries made in the same place). When you and I went there, it was still being used by the pigeons, six inches deep in pigeon shit upstairs, and the cooing-chuckling going very well with Joyce and Miller read aloud. Downstairs was a junk room, an accumulation of the detritus of summer, crumbling hammocks and badminton nets and busted croquet balls, but dry and cool. Do you remember that summer? That was the year they drilled an oil well where the old wing of Belle Isle used to be (it too had burned mysteriously a hundred years earlier), and hit gas. For the first time since the war we had a little money. Do you remember poking around the junk in the pigeonnier and finding what looked like the original Bowie knife? Maybe it was. My ancestor did know Bowie, even had a part in the notorious Vidalia sand-bar duel in which Bowie actually carved a fellow limb from limb. At any rate, my grandfather made a good story of it when I showed him the knife, claimed it was one of the originals made by Bowie’s slave blacksmith (though it wasn’t: the original was made from a rasp and still showed the grooves), and displayed it as part of his spiel to the tourists whom he used to lead around Belle Isle at a dollar a head. He’d tell them Bowie stories and Eleanor Roosevelt stories.
    Later Margot, discovering that the pigeonnier was