Lancelot

yourselves. It’s not all that important.”
    Why couldn’t I ask her what I wanted to know?
    â€œDid you—?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNothing.” I couldn’t ask.
    â€œI don’t mess with anybody and you know it. Believe it or not, I’ve found something more important than the almighty penis.”
    I think I blushed. I wished she wouldn’t say penis. It sounded white and bent off. But what would I have her say? dick? pecker? prick? tallywhacker?
    Can I explain to you how relieved I was? Relieved to hear her say so easily that she had no lovers? Such off-handedness was worth a hundred oaths. It was true! But what about Siobhan’s father? Even science can make mistakes.
    But here’s the real question. Did I want her guilty or innocent? And if she were guilty and I knew it—and I knew it as surely as I know that my blood type A plus B does not equal Siobhan’s 0—why did I want to hear her say it? Why did I believe her denial? Which is better, to have a pain and find no cause or to locate the abscess, loose the pus?
    The storm was worse. The belvedere rattled and rocked like the Tennessee Belle . Lightning was almost constant. A bolt hit the lightning rod. A blue light rolled along the widow’s walk like a ball of yarn.
    Margot was frightened. She grabbed me. “Jesus, Lance, we’re going to be killed.”
    She was scared to death. She wanted to be held. I held her.
    â€œLet’s lie down here.”
    As suddenly she let go of me. “The bench is too narrow.”
    â€œOn the floor.”
    â€œIt’s wet.”
    â€œStanding up then. I’ll hold you up like Dana.”
    â€œThat fag.”
    â€œWell—”
    â€œI have to go. I’m dead. Would you believe that acting is more exhausting than ditchdigging?”
    Would I believe? I didn’t know. But I meant to find out.
    Do you think I’m crazy? Look at me.
    Do you hear the bluejays and the children crying in the street? The very sound and soul of late after-school afternoons in the fall. Listen. They are singing skip-rope songs.
    Charlie Chaplin went to France
    To teach the girlies how to dance
    And this is the way he taught them:
    Hoola hoola
    Ponchatoola
    Salute to the captain
    Bow to the queen
    Turn your back on the submarine
    Charlie Chaplin sat on a pin
    How many inches did it go in?
    One, two, three …
    They’re counting. That’s called doing “hots.”
    The innocence of children. Didn’t your God say that unless you become as innocent as one of those, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven? Yes, but what does that mean?
    It is obvious he made a mistake or else played a very bad trick on us. Yes, I remember the innocence of childhood. Very good! But then after a while one makes a discovery. One discovers there is a little secret that God didn’t let us in on. One discovers your Christ never did tell us about it. Yet God himself so arranged it that you wake up one fine morning with a great thundering hard-on and wanting nothing more in life than a sweet hot cunt to put it in, drive some girl, any girl, into the ground, and where is the innocence of that? Is that part of the innocence? If so, he should have said so. From child to assailant through no doing of one’s own—is that God’s plan for us? Damn you and your God. Between the two of you, you should have got it straight and had it one way or the other. Either it’s good or it’s bad, but whichever it is, goddamn say so. Only you don’t. You fuck off somewhere in between. You want to have it both ways: good, but—bad only if—and so forth. Well, you fucked up good and proper, fucked us all up, for sure fucked me up. I’ll take the Romans or the old Israelites who didn’t worry about women. David had three hundred women but wanted another one. God didn’t hold it against him.
    There are only three ways to go. One is their way out there, the great whorehouse and fagdom of America. I won’t have it. The second way is sweet Baptist Jesus and I won’t have that. Christ, if heaven is full of Southern Baptists, I’d rather rot in hell with Saladin and Achilles. There is only one way and we could have had it if you Catholics hadn’t blown it: the old Catholic way. I Lancelot and you Percival, the only two to see the Grail if you recall. Did you find the Grail? You don’t look like it. Then we knew what a woman