Lancelot

here year in and year out waxing furniture and watching the camellias bloom. You can understand that.”
    â€œSure. Then let’s go to—ah, Virginia.”
    â€œVirginia?” Her face strayed two degrees toward me.
    â€œI don’t know why I said Virginia,” I said, feeling an odd not unpleasant distance opening in my head. “If not Virginia, then anywhere you please.”
    â€œNo. I’m sorry, sweetie.” She kissed and hugged me absentmindedly. In the hug I could feel that her diaphragm was held high. She was breathing in a certain way. She was being Nora.
    The drug was acting. A certain distance set in between me and myself. Here’s what I hoped for from the pills: a little space between me and the pain. I understood what Margot said but I couldn’t stand it. But how do you live with something you can’t stand? How do you get comfortable with a sword through your guts? I didn’t expect a solution or even relief. I only wanted a little distance: how does one live with it—the way a drunk lives with being a drunk, or a crook lives with being a crook? No problem! I envied both. But this! How do you live with this: being stuck onto pain like a cockroach impaled on a pin? The drug did this: before, I was part of the pain, there was no getting away from it. Now I had some distance. The pain was still there, but I stood off a ways. It became a problem to be solved. Hm, what to do about the pain? Who knows, there might even be a solution. Perhaps there’s something you can do to ease it. Let’s see.
    â€œWhy don’t you come up to the belvedere with us? It is absolutely spectacular.”
    â€œNo. There’re some things I have to do.”
    â€œVery well.” She kissed me distractedly with a loud kinfolks kiss, smack. Tock tock.
    When I finished locking the shutters, I returned to the pigeonnier. One had to lean into the south wind. There was wind between the gusts. The storm was like a man who can’t get his breath.
    The space between me and myself widened. I was sitting in my plantation rocker feeling a widening in my head.
    The next thing I knew I was still sitting in my rocker. It was moonlight outside. The moonlight was coming in. I got up and opened the door. It was still. An orange moon rose behind the English Coast. A great yellow rampart of cloud filled the western sky beyond the levee. It looked as solid as the Andes and had peaks and valleys and glaciers and crevasses.
    Leaving the door open, I went inside and sat in the rocker and thought of nothing. I breathed. My eye followed the line between the moonlight and the shadow of the doorjamb which ran across the floor of St. Joseph bricks set in a herringbone pattern.
    OUR LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS
    I must have dozed off because the next thing I remember was the certain sense that there was someone in the room with me. No mystery: I was looking straight at her. Therefore I must have dozed or I would have seen this person come in. But the interval must have been very short because the angle of moonlight lying across the bricks had not changed.
    There in the straight chair across the desk from me sat a woman I seemed to know, or at least seemed to be expected to know. She knew me. I started guiltily, smiled, and nodded to cover my lapse of manners. Christ, you remember, Percival; there must have been forty women in that parish of a certain age who look more or less alike, who have a certain connection with one’s family, but whose names one never gets straight. They are neither old nor young. They could be thirty-five or fifty-five. They look the same for thirty years. Was this Miss Irma or Cousin Callie or Mrs. Jenny James? They are dark-complexioned, have full figures and a certain reputation from the past. Something had happened to them but we did not speak of it—one’s father had got them out of trouble. Oh, you remember what happened to Callie. Perhaps she had run off with an older married man. For the next forty years they do well enough. Often they hold down a small political job at the courthouse, or sell Tupperware—perhaps Cousin Callie has been Judge Jones’s mistress for twenty years. At any rate, they outlive everybody. They are healthy. They show up at funerals, weddings, and New Year open houses. One can’t imagine what they do between times.
    The only thing I could be certain of was that this person seemed to have every right to be there in my