Lancelot

don’t care enough. Guinevere didn’t think twice about adultery. It was Lancelot, poor bastard, who went off and brooded in the woods.
    No more fuck-up about who fucks and who gets fucked. The best of women will be what we used to call ladies, like your Virgin. Our Lady. The men? The best of them will be strong and brave and pure of heart, not for Christ’s sake, but like an Apache youth or a Lacedemonian who denies himself to be strong. The others can whoremonger and screw whom they choose. But we will prevail.
    No, it is not you who are offering me something, salvation, a choice, whatever. I am offering you a choice. Do you want to become one of us? You can without giving up a single thing you believe in except milksoppery. I repeat, it was your Lord who said he came to bring not peace but a sword. We may even save your church for you.
    You are pale as a ghost. What did you whisper? Love? That I am full of hatred, anger? Don’t talk to me of love until we shovel out the shit.
    What? What happened then? Don’t look so fearful. Nothing. I saw a dirty movie, that’s all.
    Friday afternoon at the movies. That’s what I should call my own little film or videotape, which Elgin, my cinematographer, made of our little film company resting from their labors.
    It was all very simple. Elgin came to my pigeonnier after lunch, entered as briskly as a vacuum-cleaner salesman, too briskly, with a large valise-like box and a case of reels and, without looking at me, set his suitcase on my desk, opened it, plugged it in, clipped two wires to the back of my TV, showed me how to put the reels in, and, without once having raised his eyes, made as if to leave.
    â€œElgin. Wait.”
    He stood in the doorway, freeze-framed, waiting for me to push a button and set him going.
    â€œElgin, the film company is pulling out tomorrow. So you might be able to pull your equipment out today. I’ll let you know after I’ve seen these.”
    â€œI done already pulled it out,” said Elgin not briskly at all but sullenly, as if I had violated some unspoken agreement. What agreement?
    â€œThen you—”
    â€œYou won’t need to do any more taping.”
    I looked at him.
    â€œI see. That’ll be all. Go put your tour-guide coat on.”
    He looked at me strangely, at first I thought sullenly, then I saw he was ashamed. I felt a sudden anger. Later, to my astonishment, it came over me why I was angry. Again a confession which does me little credit but it is important I tell you the truth. I had to admit I was angry because he had looked . Looked at the videotape. Then it was I discovered in myself what I had so often despised in others. For I had expected Elgin to do what I told him, to be a technological eavesdropper and spy for me but not listen or look. More than that: I had expected that somehow he could not look—just as the hicks I despised believed that through some magical or at least providential dispensation the Negro bellboy cannot see the naked white woman in the same hotel room. Cannot even if he wanted to: she is somehow invisible.
    There is nothing like a liberal gone sour.
    But I was wrong. He was ashamed, not of what he had seen, but of what he took to be his failure. A technical failure. I should have known.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he said, hanging his head.
    â€œI am too.” I still thought he meant he was sorry he had looked.
    â€œIt’s a negative effect I can’t explain.”
    â€œNegative effect?”
    â€œDid you ever hold a magnet against a TV screen?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œIt pulls the images out of shape—the images being nothing but electrons, of course.”
    â€œYes, electrons.”
    â€œI only watched enough to see that the effect is a little weird—But I think you may still have what you want.”
    â€œThank you.” Ha. Then he was my nigger after all, and if he could look, wouldn’t, didn’t. Or better, he looked for technical reasons but forbore to see. He was the perfect nigger.
    He closed the door softly but presently opened it again. Again it was a Buell who still had the power to set things straight.
    Elgin still didn’t look at me. All he said, face courteously inclined in the cracked door, as courteous as a Montgomery bellboy, you see, I’m not looking—was: “Mr. Lance, let me know if there is anything you need.”
    â€œOkay.”
    Note the exquisite courtesy