Lancelot

wife’s thighs spread, a cry, not recognizably hers, escaping her lips. The equivalent of the end of the world following upon the out-of-place dot is her ecstasy inferred from the O.
    Beyond any doubt she was both beside herself and possessed by something, someone? Such considerations have led me to the conclusion that, contrary to the usual opinion, sex is not a category at all. It is not merely an item on a list of human needs like food, shelter, air, but is rather a unique ecstasy, ek-stasis, which is a kind of possession. Just as possession by Satan is not a category. You smile. You disagree? Are you then one of the new breed who believe that Satan is only a category, the category of evil?
    Yet how can such portentous consequences be inferred from such trivial evidence? I will tell you if you wish to know, but first I want to report my own reaction to my discovery, which was, to say the least, the strangest of all. You would think, wouldn’t you, that the new cuckold would respond with the appropriate emotion—shock, shame, humiliation, sorrow, anger, hate, vengefulness, etc. Would you believe me when I tell you that I felt none of these emotions? Can you guess what I did feel? Hm. What’s this? What have we here? Hm. What I felt was a prickling at the base of the spine, a turning of the worm of interest.
    Yes, interest! The worm of interest. Are you surprised? No? Yes? One conclusion I have reached here after a year in my cell is that the only emotion people feel nowadays is interest or the lack of it. Curiosity and interest and boredom have replaced the so-called emotions we used to read about in novels or see registered on actors’ faces. Even the horrors of the age translate into interest. Did you ever watch anybody pick up a newspaper and read the headline PLANE CRASH KILLS THREE HUNDRED ? How horrible! says the reader. But look at him when he hands you the paper. Is he horrified? No. he is interested. When was the last time you saw anybody horrified?
    Yet not even my sad case seems to interest you. Are you listening? What do you see down in the cemetery? The women getting ready for All Souls’ Day? whitewashing the tombs, trimming the tiny lawns, putting out chrysanthemums real and plastic, scrubbing the marble lintels. Catercornered from the cemetery if you look close is what used to be the Negro entrance to the old Majestic Theater, now Adult Cinema 16. Remember going there when we came to New Orleans? We used to see movies like The 49ers with—who? Vera Hruba Ralston (the hubba hubba girl) and Charles Starrett, or was it Veronica Lake and Preston Foster? Or Robert Preston and Virginia Mayo? Now they’re showing something called The 69ers. From here all you can make out of the poster is a kind of vague yin-yang, showing, I guess, a couple, as if Charles and Vera Hruba had got caught in the vortex of time and gone whirling yin-yanged down the years.
    Across the street you can make out the blackboard of La Branche’s Bar. What’s the specialty today? Gumbo? Oyster po’ boys, shrimp soup? And Dixie draught.
    New Orleans! Not a bad place to spend a year in prison—except in summer. Imagine being locked up in Birmingham or Memphis. What is it I can smell, even from here, as if the city had a soul and the soul exhaled an effluvium all its own? I can’t quite name it. A certain vital decay? A lively fetor? Whenever I think of New Orleans away from New Orleans. I think of rotting fish on the sidewalk and good times inside. A Catholic city in a sense, but that’s not it. Providence, Rhode Island, is a Catholic city, but my God who would want to live in Providence, Rhode Island? It’s not it, your religion, that informs this city, but rather some special local accommodation to it or relaxation from it. This city’s soul I think of as neither damned nor saved but eased rather, existing in a kind of comfortable Catholic limbo somewhere between the outer circle of hell, where sexual sinners don’t have it all that bad, and the inner circle of purgatory, where things are even better. Add to that a flavor of Marseilles vice leavened by Southern U.S.A. good nature. Death and sex treated unseriously and money seriously. The Whitney Bank is as solemn as the cemetery is lively. Protestants started Mardi Gras, you know. Presbyterians take siestas or play gin at the Boston Club. Jews ride on carnival floats celebrating the onset of Christ’s forty-day