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 wife’s thighs spread, a cry, not recognizably hers, escaping her lips. The equivalent of the end of the world following upon the out-of-place dot is her ecstasy inferred from the O.
Beyond any doubt she was both beside herself and possessed by something, someone? Such considerations have led me to the conclusion that, contrary to the usual opinion, sex is not a category at all. It is not merely an item on a list of human needs like food, shelter, air, but is rather a unique ecstasy, ek-stasis, which is a kind of possession. Just as possession by Satan is not a category. You smile. You disagree? Are you then one of the new breed who believe that Satan is only a category, the category of evil?
Yet how can such portentous consequences be inferred from such trivial evidence? I will tell you if you wish to know, but first I want to report my own reaction to my discovery, which was, to say the least, the strangest of all. You would think, wouldn’t you, that the new cuckold would respond with the appropriate emotion — shock, shame, humiliation, sorrow, anger, hate, vengefulness, etc. Would you believe me when I tell you that I felt none of these emotions? Can you guess what I did feel? Hm. What’s this? What have we here? Hm. What I felt was a prickling at the base of the spine, a turning of the worm of interest.
Yes, interest! The worm of interest. Are you surprised? No? Yes? One conclusion I have reached here after a year in my cell is that the only emotion people feel nowadays is interest or the lack of it. Curiosity and interest and boredom have replaced the so-called emotions we used to read about in novels or see registered on actors’ faces. Even the horrors of the age translate into interest. Did you ever watch anybody pick up a newspaper and read the headline PLANE CRASH KILLS THREE HUNDRED? How horrible! says the reader. But look at him when he hands you the paper. Is he horrified? No. he is interested. When was the last time you saw anybody horrified?
Yet not even my sad case seems to interest you. Are you listening? What do you see down in the cemetery? The women getting ready for All Souls’ Day? whitewashing the tombs, trimming the tiny lawns, putting out chrysanthemums real and plastic, scrubbing the marble lintels. Catercornered from the cemetery if you look close is what used to be the Negro entrance to the old Majestic Theater, now Adult Cinema 16. Remember going there when we came to New Orleans? We used to see movies like The 49ers with — who? Vera Hruba Ralston (the hubba hubba girl) and Charles Starrett, or was it Veronica Lake and Preston Foster? Or Robert Preston and Virginia Mayo? Now they’re showing something called The 69ers. From here all you can make out of the poster is a kind of vague yin-yang, showing, I guess, a couple, as if Charles and Vera Hruba had got caught in the vortex of time and gone whirling yin-yanged down the years.
Across the street you can make out the blackboard of La Branche’s Bar. What’s the specialty today? Gumbo? Oyster po’ boys, shrimp soup? And Dixie draught.
New Orleans! Not a bad place to spend a year in prison — except in summer. Imagine being locked up in Birmingham or Memphis. What is it I can smell, even from here, as if the city had a soul and the soul exhaled an effluvium all its own? I can’t quite name it. A certain vital decay? A lively fetor? Whenever I think of New Orleans away from New Orleans. I think of rotting fish on the sidewalk and good times inside. A Catholic city in a sense, but that’s not it. Providence, Rhode Island, is a Catholic city, but my God who would want to live in Providence, Rhode Island? It’s not it, your religion, that informs this city, but rather some special local accommodation to it or relaxation from it. This city’s soul I think of as neither damned nor saved but eased rather, existing in a kind of comfortable Catholic limbo somewhere between the outer circle of hell, where sexual sinners don’t have it all that bad, and the inner circle of purgatory, where things are even better. Add to that a flavor of Marseilles vice leavened by Southern U.S.A. good nature. Death and sex treated unseriously and money seriously. The Whitney Bank is as solemn as the cemetery is lively. Protestants started Mardi Gras, you know. Presbyterians take siestas or play gin at the Boston Club. Jews ride on carnival floats celebrating the onset of Christ’s forty-day fast.