Lancelot

remembered a great deal more. It was not as if I had really forgotten but rather that I didn’t have the—the what?—the inclination to think about the past. I had got out of the trick of doing it. Seeing you was a kind of catalyst, the occasion of my remembering. It is like the first time you look through binoculars: everything is confused, blurred, unfocused, flat; then all of a sudden click : distance drops away and there is everything in the round, bigger than life.
    I think I began to remember by remembering our likenesses and our differences: we both lived in old houses on the River Road on the English Coast, I in Belle Isle, you in Northumberland.
    Though we would never have admitted it, we regarded ourselves as an enclave of the English gentry set down among hordes of good docile Negroes and comical French peasants. Our families were the original Tory English colonials who accepted Spanish hospitality in Feliciana Parish to get away from the crazy rebellious Americans. But we were united less by a common history than by our dislike of Catholics and the Longs. We were honorable families.
    You and I were also classmates, fraternity brothers, and later best of friends. We went to whorehouses. I understand young men don’t have to go to whorehouses any more.
    There the resemblances stopped. Your family was rich so you went to prep school in the North. We were poor so I went to public high school. You were thin, withdrawn, and you drank too much, were said to be brilliant and to have the promise of a great future (did you?), yet you were obscure, almost unknown: when you graduated you didn’t know six people in the entire school.
    I was the opposite: the type who reaches the peak of his life in college and declines thereafter: prominent on campus, debater, second-string all-S.E.C. halfback, Rhodes scholar, even “smart,” that is, a sort of second-echelon Phi Beta Kappa. Being “smart” on the football team meant that you read Time magazine and had heard of the Marshall Plan. (“You don’t believe he can tell you about the Marshall Plan? Ask him! He’s one more smart sapsucker.”) They, my teammates, admired “smartness” more than anybody I’ve met before or since.
    I achieved my single small immortality at the age of twenty-one when I caught an Alabama punt standing on the back line of the end zone and ran it out 110 yards for a touchdown. It is still on the record books as the longest punt return in history. The beauty is, it always will be—it can’t be surpassed. It’s like running the mile in zero minutes.
    I was “smart,” but never smart in your complex way of drinking and reading Verlaine (that was an act, wasn’t it?)
    You were also belligerent when drunk and since you were built like Pope Pius XII, six feet and about 120 pounds, many was the time I had to save your ass from being whipped. (Yes, I was also Golden Gloves runner-up and though I weighed only 170 could take anybody on the football team, another source of astonishment to those Cajuns: “That son of a bitch beat the shit out of Durel Thibodeaux!” (defensive tackle, 265).
    You were melancholy and abstracted and attractive to women but so thin I had to fix you up with big handsome motherly girls who didn’t mind hugging your bones.
    There was a difference in our families. The men in my family (until my father) were gregarious, politically active (anti-Long), and violent. The men in your family tended toward depression and early suicide.
    Yet look who’s depressed now.
    You cock the same sardonic eye at me you cocked when you looked up from Verlaine.
    As I say, seeing you allowed me to remember the circumstances under which I discovered that my wife had deceived me, that is, had had carnal relations with another man.
    Is it this which was so difficult to remember? It is not that I forgot it but that I found it intolerable to think about. But why should it be intolerable? Is the sexual offense a special category and therefore unlike other offenses, theft, assault, even murder?
    Or is it that the sexual belongs to no category at all, is unspeakable? Isn’t sexual pleasure unspeakable? Then why shouldn’t the sexual offense be unspeakable?
    No, I didn’t really forget anything. It was rather that seeing you allowed me to think about it. I wonder why. Because we were friends or because you are used to hearing the unspeakable? Or