Lancelot

closed her eyes and curled around me like a burning leaf.
    I left her asleep next to Troy, the two nested like spoons.
    The rest of it? What? Oh. Yes. Well, I’ll be brief. Do you mind if I summarize? There is no pleasure in dwelling on it. Anyway it happened almost as an afterthought. The whole business took no more than fifteen minutes.
    I didn’t see what I wanted to see after all. What did I want to see? the money in my father’s sock drawer? Why was it so important for me to see them, Margot and Jacoby? What new sweet-horrid revelation did I expect to gain from witnessing what I already knew? Was it a kind of voyeurism? Or was it a desire to feel the lance strike home to the heart of the abscess and let the puss out? I still didn’t know. I knew only that it was necessary to know, to know only as the eyes know. The eyes have to know.
    But I did not see them after all. I felt them.
    I entered Margot’s bedroom, mine and Margot’s, that is. Somehow there seemed no great need for precautions now. Perhaps it was because the storm was at its height. There was a steady shrieking as if the hurricane were blowing through steel rigging. It was pitch dark. So I could not hear them or see them! Who was shrieking? they? the hurricane? both? Belle Isle groaned and labored. The great timbers sang and popped overhead. The lightning was less frequent now but brighter. I waited and counted during the intervals. The flashes came about eight or ten seconds apart.
    The shrieking was so loud it seemed to make things invisible.
    Now in the short foyer of the master bedroom I knelt and lit the second lamp, this time leaving the chimney off. I began to worry about leaving the chimney on the lamp in Raine’s room. I turned the wick low.
    Standing straight against the wall of the foyer, I calculated I could see the reflection of the foot of the bed in the mirror of the huge crotch mahogany armoire which stood against the inside wall of the bedroom. I waited, perfectly still, back, head, palms of hands touching the cool plaster.
    When the lightning flashed, striping the room through the shutters, I could see two bedposts striped like barber poles in the mirror even though the mirror was fogged by age, its silvering moth-eaten.
    It was the great Calhoun bed, built by my ancestor for his friend John C. Calhoun to sleep in in the White House in 1844. But Calhoun never slept in the White House so Royal Moultrie Lamar kept the bed. It was like a cathedral, a Gothic bed, posts as thick as trees, carved and fluted and tapering to spires and gargoyles above the canopy. The headboard was as massive and complex as an altar screen. Panels of openwork braced posts and rails like flying buttresses.
    Between flashes I walked without hurrying to the cul-de-sac between the armoire and the far wall. From here one looked directly at the top half of the bed. The shrieking grew worse but the lightning was a long time coming. It came, a short bright burst like a camera flashbulb. Something moved. But my view was obstructed by the triangular bracing between the post and the side rail.
    Something white gleamed on the Aubusson rug at my feet. I picked it up. A handkerchief? No, a pair of jockey shorts. I gazed at it dreamily. There was something archaic about it, an ancient artifact it was. It was like finding a toilet article, a broken clay comb in one of the houses at Pompeii. I dropped it behind me and waited.
    Presently the lightning stopped but the noise was so loud, a bass roaring and soprano shrieking, that it was palpable, a thickening and curdling of the darkness. It became natural to open one’s mouth to let the sound circulate, shriek into one’s ears and out the mouth. I felt invisible.
    Then, though I don’t remember how I got there, I was standing by the bed looking down. There was nothing to see. Kneeling I put my ear to the openwork panel of the flying buttress, an unconsecrated priest hearing an impenitent confession. But presently, in a lull there was a voice. I could not make out the words but the voice rose and fell in a prayer-like intonation.
    God. Sh— God. Sh—
    In my confessional I fell to musing. Why does love require the absolute polarities of divinity-obscenity? I was right about love: it is an absolute and therefore beyond all categories. Who else but God arranged that love should pitch its tent in the place of excrement? Why not then curse and call on God in an act of love?
    My eyes