Lancelot

dropped it as quickly—and the actors’ way of droning away in their mock enthusiasm for mock projects. Jacoby would go on and on about moving to Louisiana and starting a crawfish farm, going into great detail about the marketing and distribution of this remarkable shellfish, yet do it with a slight gap of inattention even to himself as if he were listening to his voice. What was surprising was how good she was at acting like one of them and how lousy she was at acting the second the cameras rolled.
    In the lightning flashes I was looking at her and thinking how much I loved her. “Loved” her? Being “in love.” What does that mean? It means that I lived for love. “Lived for love.” What does that mean? It means simply that she was my happiness and that without her I was not happy. As the saying goes, I didn’t know what happiness was until I met her. Do you notice that it is impossible to speak of love without sounding like Tin Pan Alley? But it’s the truth nevertheless. I can’t live without you. Jesus, is there any other way to say it? I might have been content in my unhappiness if I had not met her, like one of those cave fish that don’t have eyes and don’t miss the sun.
    But if I loved her, why did the discovery of her infidelity cause a pang of pleasure within me?
    Before we were married she would drive by my office mid-afternoons and pick me up. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.
    â€œBut, Margot, I’m bushed”—I, a mole, a creaky, seer-suckered, liberal mole droning out the days with title search, estate succession, and integrating the schools of Feliciana Parish. Perhaps this was what I thought happiness was: keeping the River Road estates intact for the white gentry and evening things up by helping the Negroes.
    Off we’d go, up or down the River Road, she driving her little $20,000 Mercedes, top down. I still blinking like a mole in the October sunlight beside her, dusty from the Annotated Louisiana Code, sniffing the German leather warm and fragrant in the sun.
    Strange: It was almost as if she were the man, I the woman, so much did she take the lead, work the radio, drive the car like a man, drum her nails on the wheel, gauge the traffic, look swiftly back past me to change lanes, cast ahead in her mind for destination and route. I lumpish and docile in the seat beside her, hands in my lap, like a big dumb coed.
    Like a man she was. I said, except that she would tilt her head and cut her eyes over to me, lids narrowed, lips thinned, seriously yet unseriously, as no man ever did. Or, to make herself comfortable in the hot afternoon sun, in a quick second’s motion lift her ass off the seat (she could dress in thirty seconds: she told me when she was a child she used to walk to town on Saturday in school clothes and change in the filling station restroom), hike her skirt up exposing her legs. Thought I, goofy from work and drunk on October pine-winey sunlight, catching sight of the sweet heavy convergence of her inner thighs: that is where I want to live, make my habitation.
    â€œWell?” she’d say, driving up on the levee, stopping and leaning over the wheel cradled in her arms (like a man), gaze sideways at me, diamonds of sweat glittering on her upper lip.
    Aha! She’s parked. What next? I felt a tingling running up the backs of my legs. Is this the way a woman feels, I wondered, when the man parks? Hm. We’re parked! What next?
    â€œYou know what you are?” she’d ask.
    â€œNo, what?”
    â€œA big raunchy Sterling Hayden.”
    â€œWho’s he?”
    â€œSterling Hayden tending bar in Macao, in seersuckers.”
    â€œIs that good?”
    They were beautiful October days. Do you know that I made one of the biggest discoveries of my life? It is the simplest of all discoveries but do you know that to this good day I don’t know whether I was the last man on earth to make it or whether I was the only man. Was I the dumbest man in the world or the luckiest? It is this: There is a life to be lived and a joy in living it and the joy has nothing to do with our crazy college carryings-on or with my crazy romantic dream of love with Lucy at Highlands. No, it was so much simpler than that. It was simply that there is such a thing as a beautiful day to go out into, a road to travel, good food to eat when you’re hungry, wine to drink when you’re thirsty, and most of all,