Lancelot

fast.
    I like your banal little cathedral in the Vieux Carré. It is set down squarely in the midst of the greatest single concentration of drunks, drugheads, whores, pimps, queers, sodomists in the hemisphere. But isn’t that where cathedrals are supposed to be? It, like the city, has something else even more comforting to me, a kind of triumphant mediocrity. The most important event which occurred here in all of history was the John L. Sullivan–Jim Corbett fight. Three hundred years of history and it has never produced a single significant historical event, one single genius, or even a first-class talent—except a chess player, the world’s greatest. But genius makes people nervous, including the genius, so he quit playing chess and began worrying about money like everyone else. It is altogether in keeping that the famous Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war was over and was without significance.
    After the terrible events at Belle Isle, a year of non-events in a place like this is a relief. There is a sense here of people seriously occupied with small tasks. We, you and I, our families, were different from the Creoles. We lived from one great event to another, tragic events, triumphant events, with years of melancholy in between. We lost Vicksburg, got slaughtered at Shiloh, fought duels, defied Huey Long, and were bored to death between times. The Creoles have the secret of living ordinary lives well. A hundred years from now I don’t doubt that women like those out there will be scrubbing the tombs on All Souls’ Day, a La Branche will be polishing his bar, and a dirty movie will be playing across the street.
    But in order for you to understand what happened at Belle Isle and why I am here, you must understand exactly how it was that day a year ago. I was sitting in my pigeonnier as snug as could be, the day very much like today, the same Northern tang in the air, but utterly still, sun shining, sky as blue as Nebraska cornflowers, not a cloud in the sky. I was reading a book. Yet even before I glanced down at my desk and discovered my wife’s infidelity, there was something odd about the day. You will understand this because we, you and I, used to have a taste for the odd and the whimsical.
    For now that I’ve thought about it, things were a little odd even before my interesting discovery. There I sat in my pigeonnier, happy as could be, master of Belle Isle, the loveliest house on the River Road, gentleman and even bit of a scholar (Civil war, of course), married to a beautiful rich loving (I thought) wife, and father (I thought) to a lovely little girl; a moderate reader, moderate liberal, moderate drinker (I thought), moderate music lover, moderate hunter and fisherman, and past president of the United Way. I moderately opposed segregation. I was moderately happy. At least at the moment I was happy. But not for the reasons given above. The reason I was happy was that I was reading for perhaps the fourth or fifth time a Raymond Chandler novel. It gave me pleasure, (no, I’ll put it more strongly: it didn’t just give me pleasure, it was the only way I could stand my life) to sit there in old goldgreen Louisiana under the levee and read, not about General Beauregard, but about Philip Marlowe taking a bottle out of his desk drawer in his crummy office in seedy Los Angeles in 1933 and drinking alone and all those from-nowhere people living in stucco bungalows perched in Laurel Canyon. The only way I could stand my life in Louisiana, where I had everything, was to read about crummy lonesome Los Angeles in the 1930’s. Maybe that should have told me something. If I was happy, it was an odd sort of happiness.
    But it was odder even than that. Things were split. I was physically in Louisiana but spiritually in Los Angeles. The day was split too. One window let onto this kind of October day, blue sky, sun shining, children already building Christmas bonfires on the levee from willows their fathers had cut on the batture. The other window let onto a thunderstorm. My wife’s friend’s film company had set up a thunderstorm machine in the tourist parking lot where ordinarily cars from Michigan, Indiana, Ohio would be parked while rumpled amiable bemused Midwesterners paid their five dollars and went gawking through the great rooms as foreign to them as Castel Gandolfo (never, surely, in history were there ever a stranger pair than those victors and us