Lancelot

99 percent of all, no: all of all: a woman to love.
    What else is there really in life, dear Percival, than love, an October day, a slope of levee, warm lips to kiss, and this droll man-woman creature lying beside me who was mostly man driving the car until the moment I kissed her, when all at once she became all woman and I could feel her neck giving way in that sweet flection-extension no man’s vertebrae ever managed, and her body of itself and in all its lovely breadth turn toward me on its axis to greet, salute me.
    Yes, she loved me then. How do I know? Because at last I woke from my stupor and, remembering what courting was, courted her. In love, I drove to New Orleans to get her out of a Colonial Dames convention (for some reason it was important to her to be a Dame and damned if she didn’t haul me to South Carolina to find and photograph the tombstone of her only WASP ancestor (no Reilly in that war! a Johnson—sure enough, a Private Aaron Johnson killed in the Battle of Cowpens!). Into the ballroom of the St. Charles I walked, and up and down the aisle until I spied her in the crowd of two thousand lily-white Dames listening to another Dame talking about preserving U.S. ideals and so forth and, spotting her, signaled her out with a peremptory angling off of head and she came out, at first fearful: Was somebody dead?—then clapped her hands with joy, hugged and kissed me: “Oh, I’m so glad to see you! You came to see me! to get me? Oh oh—”
    Being “in love” means that my heart leaped at the sight of her. I felt like clapping my hands too. Why her and no other woman? She had two eyes, a nose, mouth, legs like a billion other women—like a million other good-looking women, yet she acquired for me a priceless value. Elizabeth Taylor, as beautiful as she was then, could have walked by and I wouldn’t have looked at her twice. It was almost religious. Things she owned were like saints’ relics. The place where she lived with Tex, the big Garden District house, became a shrine—I could drive around and around the block and feel the tingle in my legs when I caught sight of the house—a Taj Mahal which held my live princess.
    Was it possible that a man could be so happy on one afternoon and that there were so many afternoons? It was all so simple. We’d drive until we found a pretty place, a stretch of levee, a meadow off the Natchez Trace. We’d walk till we got tired, drink, eat, kiss, neck !
    A confession: She took the lead the first time. No, not the first. The second. The first was my crude way with her the first time I saw her, barefoot and muddy, at Belle Isle, getting under her hoopskirt and so forth.
    That day we had eaten crawfish étouffé and gumbo and drunk two bottles of wine and were full and happy and zooming up the River Road in the October twilight and I was thinking of a place to go to park, maybe even a meadow to lie in. But she just said: “Let’s go to bed.” I swallowed hard and felt like saying gollee or something like, a thirty-five-year-old man: gollee. Nowadays any eighteen-year-old would laugh at me. Yes, but I notice that young men are not as happy with their girls, at least not as happy as I was. “Do you know a place?” she asked. Happily, I did, in Asphodel, a little tourist cottage in a glen off the Trace. My hand trembled as I registered. She undressed without bothering to turn out the light (as quickly as in the Texaco restroom in Odessa: zip! zip! naked!). She stood naked before the mirror, hands at her hair, one knee bent, pelvis aslant. She turned to me and put her hands under my coat and in her funny way took hold of a big pinch of my flank on each side. Gollee. Could any woman have been as lovely? She was like a feast. She was a feast. I wanted to eat her. I ate her.
    That was my communion, Father—no offense intended, that sweet dark sanctuary guarded by the heavy gold columns of her thighs, the ark of her covenant.
    I helped her with the windows in the belvedere. It was not a hurricane yet but an ordinary thunderstorm. From this height one could see in the lightning white caps in the river and the far bank. It was like the sea.
    She sat on the bench eyes straight ahead like a seasick passenger.
    â€œMargot, let’s leave.”
    â€œWhat?” The storm made a racket.
    â€œLet’s get in the car and drive to North Carolina. Right now. The colors are at their