Lancelot

an architectural gem, had it converted into a study for me. To her delight, after scraping off 150 years of pigeon shit they found the original cypress floor of two-by-twelves marvelously preserved, two-foot-thick walls of slave brick—even pigeons lived better than we do now. She found me a plantation desk and chair made by slave artisans and there I sat, feeling like Jeff Davis at Beauvoir. ready to write my memoirs. Except I had no memoirs. There was nothing to remember.
    At any rate, it was there at 5:01 in the afternoon that I discovered purely by chance that my wife had been, and probably was still, unfaithful to me.
    It is a mystery which I ponder endlessly: that my life is divided into two parts. Before and After, before and after the moment I discovered that my wife had been rendered ecstatic, beside herself, by a man on top of her.
    My discovery occurred purely by accident. At exactly 5:01 p.m. the Ethyl whistle had just stopped blowing.
    I happened to look down at my desk and saw something. Only on second sight—and I don’t even know why I looked at it again—did it begin to take on a terrific significance.
    My reaction was not what you might suppose. I can only compare it, my reaction, to that of a scientist, an astronomer say, who routinely examines photographic plates of sectors of the heavens and sees the usual random scattering of dots of light. He is about to file away one such plate, has already done so, when a tiny little something clicks in his head. Hold on. Hm. Whoa. What’s this? Something is wrong. Let’s have a look. So he takes another look. Yes, sure enough, one dot, not even a bright dot, one of the lesser dots, is a bit out of place. You’ve seen the photos in the newspapers, random star dots and four arrows pointing to a single dot. To make sure, the astronomer compares this plate with the last he took of the same tiny sector of the heavens. Sure enough, the dot is out of place. It has moved. What of it, thinks the layman, one insignificant dot out of a billion dots slightly out of place? The astronomer knows better: the dot is one millisecond out of place, click click goes the computer, and from the most insignificant observation the astronomer calculates with absolute certainty and finality that a comet is on a collision course with the earth and will arrive in two and a half months. In eight weeks the dot will have grown to the size of the sun, the oceans risen forty feet. New York will be under water, skyscrapers toppling, U.N. meeting on Mount Washington, etc.
    How can such dire and absolutely verifiable events follow upon the most insignificant of evidence?
    In my case, the evidence was not the minute shift of a dot on a photographic plate but a letter on my desk. No, not a love letter; no, I mean a letter in the alphabet. The letter O . I’ll explain, if you’re interested. Christ, you don’t seem to be. Are you watching that girl I hear singing? I hear her every day. You know her, don’t you?
    I’ve seen you speak to her on the levee. She’s lovely, isn’t she? Clean jeans, clean combed hair halfway down her back. She crosses the levee every day. I think she lives in one of the shacks on the batture. Probably a transient from the North, like one of the hundreds of goldfinches who blow in every October.
    One becomes good at observing people after a year, like an old lady who has nothing better to do than peep through the blinds. I observed that you know her well. Are you in love with her?
    Ah, that does surprise you, doesn’t it? Listen to the girl. She’s singing.
    Freedom’s just another word, Lord, for nothing
left to lose
Freedom was all she left for me
    Do you believe that? Maybe the girl and I come closer to believing it than you, even though you surrendered your freedom voluntarily and I didn’t. Maybe the girl knows more than either of us.
    But we were speaking not of astronomical categories but rather of the sexual. A horse of another color, you might say. Well, yes and no. There are certain similarities. Compare the two discoveries. The astronomer sees a dot in the wrong place, makes a calculation, and infers the indisputable: comet on collision course, tidal waves, oceans rising, forests ablaze. The cuckold sees a single letter of the alphabet in the wrong place. From such insignificant evidence he can infer with at least as much certitude as the astronomer an equally incommensurate scene: his