Then what do I want of her, the woman next door?
In some strange way she is like Lucy. Lucy was a virgin! and I did not want her otherwise. What I wanted was to dance with her on a summer night, hold her lightly and look into her eyes. I wanted Margot’s sweet Texas ass and I wanted Lucy’s opaque Georgia eyes.
This girl in the next cell is not a virgin. She was raped by three men in one night and then forced to perform fellatio on them.
I’ve learned more about her. In fact, I managed to catch a glimpse of her chart while the nurses were off in the lounge drinking coffee. She is twenty-nine and comes, like Lucy, from Georgia. She dropped out of Agnes Scott, a fine young-ladies’ school, and went to live in an artists’ community in La Jolla. The standard boring story of our times. Then, thinking better of it, of California and the New Life (which of course is not a new life at all but the last spasm of the old, the logical and inevitable culmination, the very caricature of the old, the new life being nothing more or less than what their parents would do if they dared), she removed to the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, lived in Desire project, offered herself up in service to mankind. Whereupon mankind took her up on her offer, raped her for her pains, and left her for dead in the Quarter.
Then how is she like Lucy? How is she the Lucy of the new world? Is it because the violation she suffered has in some sense restored her virginity, much as a person recovering from the plague is immune to the plague? I don’t quite know why she is so much like Lucy except that I want the same thing of her I wanted from Lucy: to come close but keep a little distance between us, to ask the simplest questions in a new language—How are you—just to hear the sound of her voice, to touch the tips of her fingers, to hand her through an open door ahead of me, my hand pressed lightly against the small of her back. The night of the day I discovered Margot’s infidelity, I left my old life path, became sober for the first time in years, bathed, shaved, dressed in clean clothes, and spent the night wide awake and watchful in my plantation rocker placed at such an angle that, looking through a window and the one clear pane of glass in the stained-glass door Margot had sure enough found for me (the final camp touch which Margot said would make the pigeonnier a charming little place and it did), I could see Belle Isle and most of the private drive.
My supper companions had left for the Holiday Inn about eleven o’clock to view the week’s rushes. That took no more than an hour, but afterwards they often got carried away by discussion, “more like knock-down-drag-out-argument,” said Margot, which went on till one or two in the morning.
How long would the knock-down-drag-out argument last that night, I wondered and, instead of drinking myself to sleep, stayed up to see.
She did not come home at all.
Or rather her Country Squire wagon, she alone in it, turned into the driveway at 8:30 the next morning, rolling so slowly that it hardly made a crunch in the pea gravel. As punctually as Kant setting out for the university at exactly six o’clock so that shopkeepers along the way could set their watches by him, it had been my custom to arise at exactly nine o’clock, stagger to a cold shower, and, of late, take a drink. At exactly 9:37 (two minutes after the news) I would take my seat at the breakfast table at Belle Isle. At 10:15 I was at my office, helping Negroes in the sixties, handling old ladies’ estates in the seventies.
That morning I sat in my plantation rocker, sober and clear-headed, and rocked for a while.
I sat down to breakfast at the usual time, Margot ate heartily, elbows on table, wiry head bent over steaming scrambled eggs. My hand shook slightly as I drank coffee; my stomach shrank as if braced against the first hot bourbon of the day.
“How were the rushes?”
“Oh. Christ. One abortion after another. The bloody color was off again. Bob was beside himself.”
Now bloody was the word. Merlin was not really English but lived there long enough so that everything was bloody this and bloody that.
In my new sobriety things were better and worse. My senses were acute, too acute. I became aware of the warp and woof of the tablecloth. My eyes followed one linen thread under and over, under and over. I noticed flecks of white porcelain showing through the worn gold leaf on the rim of the coffee cup where the lips touched it ninety degrees away from the handle. When Elgin touched me to see if I wanted more coffee, I nearly jumped out of my chair.
I watched Margot. She ate like a horse and looked fine, not fat but firm and full-armed. Ten years had turned her from callow coltish skittish-mustang Texas girl to assured chatelaine and mistress of Belle Isle, more Louisianian than Louisianians for they didn’t know what they were like and she did. Her face was if anything more soft-eyed and voluptuous, as only a thirty-two-year-old woman can be voluptuous. There was now a fine freckling over her bare shoulders from her golfing, like a lady golf pro. In the thin clear translucent skin beside the nose bridge, the freckles had merged into a darkening and dampening which in any other woman might have looked like circles under eyes but in her was simply plum-shadow and ripeness. When she sat down she settled herself, broadening her bottom to fit exactly the shallow B-shaped scoop of her chair.
Outwardly nothing was changed. Yet when I folded the newspaper and pushed back my chair to leave, she wiped the last crumb of bacon from her lip and said almost to herself: “I was tired afterwards — in fact I got sick as a dog so I stayed on at the Inn, barged in on Raine and just said, Sister, move over.”
Nothing was changed except that when she said that, I was pushing away from the table and I stopped a second both arms outstretched to the table’s edge. More than a second, for my eyes were on the second hand of my watch. A fly crawled along the gold band (gift from Margot). I waited for him to step off onto my wrist. He did. I watched him touch a hair. He did, crawling under it, everting and scrubbing his wings. As he did so, he moved the hair. The hair moved its root which moved a nerve which sent a message to my brain. I felt a tickle.
I went to my office as usual, came home for lunch as usual, returned to the pigeonnier as usual, but instead of having three drinks and taking a nap, I sent for Elgin.
Tell me something. Why did I have to know the truth about Margot and know it with absolute certainty? Or rather why, knowing the truth, did I have to know more, prove more, see? Does one need to know more, ever more and more, in order that one put off acting on it or maybe even not act at all?
But why? Why did it become the most important, the sole obsession of my very life, to determine whether or not Margot slept with Merlin when in fact I knew she had, or at least with somebody not me? You tell me, you being the doctor-scientist and soul expert as well, merchant of guilt and getting rid of it and of sorting out sins yet knowing as well as I that it, her fornication, anybody’s fornication, amounts to no more than molecules encountering molecules and little bursts of electrons along tiny nerves — no different in kind from that housefly scrubbing his wings under my hair.
Well, for once you look very solemn and unironic. Did I love her? you ask.
Love. Hm. The older I get, the less I know about such large subjects. I can say this. There was a time just before and after we were married when I could not not touch her. There was no getting enough of her. The very behavior I used to abhor in others I carried on with her and never a second thought or care in this world; touch her in public. Neck! Go to the A & P with her, heft the cold red beef flesh in one hand and hold her warm hand with the other and in the parking lot at four o’clock in the afternoon neck! Spoon! We’d drive down the road like white trash in a pickup truck, heads noodled together, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. thigh to thigh, my right hand thrust fondly between her legs.