Lancelot by Walker Percy

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.
    Even later when we drank too much together, it was good, the drinking, drunkenness, and the coming together every whichway, on the floor, across the table, under the table, standing up in a coat closet at a party. There was no other thought than to possess her, as much of her with as much of me and any way at all, all ways and it seemed for always. Drinking, laughing, and loving, it is a good life. Not even marriage spoils it. For a while.
    Did I love her then, that day I speak of? Love. No, not love. Not hatred, not even jealousy. What do those old words mean? Emotions? Were there ever any such things as emotions? If so, people have fewer emotions these days. Merlin’s actors could register fifteen standard emotions and not share a single real feeling between them.
    No, my only “emotion” was a sense of suddenly coming alive, that peculiar wakefulness when a telephone rings in the middle of the night. That and an all-consuming curiosity. I had to know. If Merlin “knew” my wife, I had to know his knowing her.
    Why? I don’t know. I ask you. That’s what I want with you. Not knowing why, I don’t really know why I did what I did. I only knew for the first time in years exactly what to do. I sent for Elgin.
    Elgin was surprised to be summoned and more surprised to see me. No bottle, no drinks, no naps, no