Lancelot

sinister quietness about things? Isn’t this usually true of hurricanes?”
    â€œI suppose. I hadn’t really noticed.”
    â€œI was telling Lucy that there is more than coincidence involved here.”
    â€œHow’s that?”
    â€œHow could such a coincidence happen, that at the very time we are making a film about a hurricane, a real hurricane should come?”
    â€œWell, it could. This is hurricane season.”
    â€œWhat are the mathematical chances involved? One in a million? There is more than weather involved. There is more than light involved. I feel the convergence of all our separate lines of force. Can’t you feel something changed in the air between all of us?”
    â€œWell—”
    â€œI do, Raine!” cried Lucy, hugging Raine’s arm.
    Raine, color high in her cheek, spoke to me with her head ducked, as flirtatiously as Siobhan. Was this her way of being shy about her mystical convictions?
    â€œThere’s a force field around all of us, waxing and waning,” said Raine absently, suddenly waning herself, losing interest. She spoke a little more, but inattentively.
    â€œMaybe you’re right, Raine.” I could never figure out the enthusiasm of movie folk. It was as if they were possessed fitfully by demons, but demons of a very low order to whom one needn’t pay strict attention.
    Miss Maude, like Lucy, fixed on Raine, eyes glistening.
    Dana came moseying in, thumbs hooked in his jeans. Miss Maude’s eyes bulged. He was something to see. Maybe he was the new sunlit god come to save this sad town. But when, ignoring us, he began to talk to Raine, it was about his—investments! Bad news from London, where he had bought a pub which made money but the government took 90 percent of it! “Christ, if I had just listened to Bob about Cayman,” and so forth—fretting! eyes crossed with worry about alimony and taxes, and all at once you saw that he was an optical illusion, a trick, that his beauty was not only accidental and that he had no part in it but that he didn’t even credit himself with it. He was like a hound dog wearing a diamond necklace.
    Miss Maude was suddenly possessed by a demon all her own. Imploringly, almost tearfully, eyes glistening, she offered Raine her house for the scene between Lipscomb the decadent planter and his aunt, a strong aristocratic type (“Christ, can’t you see Ouspenskaya doing her!” said Merlin), who tells him his true strength comes from the land. “You always have the land! The land is eternal!” and so forth. Miss Maude seemed to know all about the movie.
    â€œThank you, Maude,” said Raine, giving her a hug. “I’ll tell Jan and Bob.” Raine, I saw, was in a kind of ecstasy of benevolence. It pleased her to be nice to Miss Maude. Raine’s face shone like a saint’s or like Ingrid Bergman’s. Was it the hurricane which excited her or the exaltation of being a movie star and confirming her stardom in the faces of ordinary folk?
    I blinked. All at once Miss Maude, whom I had known all my life or thought I knew, went off her rocker. Or she had been off her rocker for forty years and now at last came to herself. In fact she said so.
    Her face suddenly wrinkled up like a prune, her eyes glittered with tears. At first I thought she was crying, but it was not grief, it was happiness, gratitude. She twisted a handkerchief in her hands.
    â€œI just can’t tell you what it means to me,” said Miss Maude, pumping her tired hands back and forth.
    â€œRaine got Jan to give Miss Maude a walk-on in the library scene,” explained Lucy.
    â€œIs there any way I can tell you?” implored Miss Maude, coming ever closer to Raine, wringing her hands, frantic with an emotion not even she could name.
    â€œYou did a good job,” said Raine, backing off, getting a little more than she had bargained for. “You’re a beautiful person. Maude.”
    â€œOh, Raine, Raine, Raine,” said Maude and actually threw back her head and closed her eyes.
    I looked at Maude in astonishment. Had everybody in this town gone nuts or was I missing something? The special nuttiness of the movie people I was used to, but the town had gone nuts. Town folk, not just Maude, acted as if they lived out their entire lives in a dim charade, a shadow-play in which they were the shadows, and now all at once to have appear miraculously in their