The Floating World

by Babst, C. Morgan

  He opened his sketchbook, flipped from the back through the white pages. Nothing. Literally nothing since landfall, or less than nothing—he’d written down the names of some roofers, two blank pages after the last sketch he’d done at the breakfast table before they’d started to pack up, some bullshit about entropy, cribbed from Yeats. From the high shelf, the Tess portraits looked down at him in judgment.

  He was free of her, though, wasn’t he? She was gone, had been gone probably for a long time. If he looked at them right, the sculptures, a yearly record of their marriage, recorded the stages of her departure. The girl aged—her nose thinning, her jowls loosening. Little by little, she lost her joy. Those from the first years of their marriage—Tess recumbent on imagined pillows, head thrown back; Tess with her legs crossed at the ankle and flowers in her hair—looked shy of his touch. How pathetic he was. How pathetic he had been all along. This was the foretold loss of pride he hadn’t expected, though they had all warned him it would come.

  She’s a who? his father had asked him.

  An Eshleman.

  An Eshleman, like I put wax on her mama’s furniture, Eshleman. His father whistled, hot as a factory blowing quitting time. Son, you are out of your ever-loving mind.

  She had always been going to leave him. You could see it in the portraits from 1981, ’89, ’92, ’93, ’97. Her lip puffed out over her teeth. Her hand gripping her hair as she bent over an absent desk. Eyes closed. Mouth open. Cuticles bitten. He would invite her to sit for him: an act of devotion, as one would pay to an archaic god. But she saw it as her doing him a favor, and maybe he had been worshipping her for his own pleasure all along, so that his love for her would overwhelm hers for him, so that she would always remain the desired thing, the unattained, the girl who was always slipping from him, evaporating, so that he was left crouching like a boy in a storybook to peel her shadow off the ground.

  He reached for his favorite of her portraits: Cora in her belly, she stood submerged to the waist in a sea of negative space, her hands riding the surface of the water. He had carved her whole and then carved away along the line of the water—a wave that skirted her hip then heaved as high as the undercurve of her breast, the yin of the invisible water running up against the yang of her belly. One part of that belly was hers, one part his, and he had felt unexpectedly triumphant at that, the idea of the bit of himself growing inside her, entwining with that bit of her. And now they were gone. Tess was gone. Cora was gone. Everyone was gone. He weighed the little sculpture in his cupped palm. Tess had stood in the Gulf for hours that day, laughing, the water holding the baby up. That night as they’d lain in the gritty hotel sheets, she had thanked him for the child, thanked him for showing her what she wanted. He supposed she’d decided now that he had been wrong.

  One of the striplights began to flicker, and beyond the windows, the fog was burning off the lawn. He ran his thumb along the edge of her belly where the wave broke it. A sharp edge. He should bury them, probably, the way people clipped their exes out of photographs, burned their letters. But the paint can still sat in the middle of a mudflat of congealed paint, six inches of brown left in the can. He dropped her into the paint, and she went under, everything submerged but the top of her head and one ocean-eaten arm.

  He was so disgusted he nearly spat, his stomach turning over with the chemical smell of paint. He wasn’t free, wasn’t in control. Probably never would be. He closed his sketchbook, took his coffee, slammed out the door.

  “SYLVIA?” PAPIE DRAGGED a breath in through his mouth, coughed.

  Del held out the cup to her grandfather. The skinny psychiatric nurse had come in when she’d first arrived, given her instructions. She was supposed to avoid stressing him. She was supposed to, within reason, find a place within his delusions and play along.

  “She’s not here right now,” Del said. “Had to go out and get a few things.”

  “Funny, you.” He coughed, reached out his lips for the straw, drank. “Funny.”

  Del turned towards the monitors—beeping a steady rhythm, his bodily functions drawing mountain ranges, his temperature getting closer to normal, 101.9. She’d sung a lullaby to Tina’s baby last night, and it was still in her head, images of a cowboy alone under his blanket in the Rockies, the trucker cresting an icy ridge. His horse and his cattle are his only companions. Zack had said he would come, but if he didn’t, she could roll herself up in her sleeping bag and commune with the stars.

  “Sylvia?”

  “I’m not Sylvia, Vincent. I’m Adelaide.”

  “Adelaide. I knew an Adelaide.”

  She nodded. “I heard you needed some help.”

  “Oh.” Papie knit his brows, his hand floundered on the sheet. “I’m sorry, my mind’s somewhere else. I was waiting on my wife to join me. Adelaide, you said?”

  She nodded.

  “Pretty. I knew someone by that name, I believe.” His hand scrabbled again, as if he would have liked to shake her hand.

  She wanted to tell him about the first Adelaide—to remind him of the looping signature on the free papers, the lithograph of the severe woman in the tignon and lace who had once been a slave and was now the mother of the richest free man of color in the city—but she had been told not to disturb him, and that would definitely do it, all of that history rotted away. She thought of Phillip, how he’d thought it was funny to call her “Little Vincent,” half-implying that that was her value to him and to the auction house, her pedigree the only reason they’d hired her. How marvelous it must have been, he’d say, just to grow up among his things, just to be in that workshop—never mind that Phillip’s image of her grandfather was so antiquated he probably envisioned “that workshop” as something out of a nineteenth-century etching. I would love to meet him—one of the last practitioners of the fine tradition of African American craftsmanship. Reverence, but always with a twinge of affirmative action.

  “I believe we’ve met before,” she said, instead. “You are Vincent Boisdoré, the master cabinetmaker, correct?”

  “Oh.” He turned to her. “I’m sorry. After the ship was torpedoed, it’s like I lose things.”

  “That’s alright.”

  “It’s like my hull’s full of holes.”

  “It’s alright, sir. Truly.”

  “You’ve heard about me?”

  “Someone told me you were an expert. I’m very interested to learn.”

  “Well, my dear. I’m happy to tell you anything, you have such beautiful eyes. Amber eyes, like jewels.” On the folded-back sheet, he brought his hands together, fingers and then thumbs. “This is for the Picayune?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’ll have to let me check you over. I’m not interested in having secrets just spread about.” The hand went up, as if he was sowing seed.

  “Of course. Nothing you’re uncomfortable with.”

  He nodded. “Alright. You want I should take you through from the beginning, then? I’m starting a new project. Conceptualizing. You know about oysters?”

  “Oysters?” She smiled forcefully and put her elbows on her knees. “I like them fried.”

  His eyes crinkled up, the green lights in their hazel sparking, and he laughed, a big guffaw. “Me too, child,” he said. “Me too. But that’s not what I’m talking about. There’s something we cabinetmakers call an oyster, ’cause I suppose it looks like one, but actually it’s wood, marquetry. The center of the tree. We tend to use walnut or olive, because they have a nice contrast between the heartwood and the sap. By which I mean, normally, I’d take a hunk of a tree—or one of its branches, usually—into my band saw and slice off little disks, then use a template to cut out their middles, where the wood is hardest and prettiest. This time, though, I’m thinking something else. I want it bigger, just a single patera if I’m going to make a table, or one for each door of an armoire. Not oysters exactly, but something more like,” he said, and then lids fluttered over his eyes, and he stopped talking. His left hand still moved,
though, his fingers tracing a circle on the bedclothes, pulling the bleached cotton into a rough spiral, like a cloud formation. He traced the shape in the fabric as if he was following the edge’s of a tree’s rings, following their rhythm as they tightened, moving away from the living bark through sapwood towards the dark, dense heartwood formed in decades past.

  AUGIE SAT DOWN at the Dobies’ patio table and popped open the lid of the Styrofoam box, letting the smell of hamburger into the green air. Troy had called that morning—Reyna’s identity confirmed, arson ruled out as a cause for the fire—but Tess’s head was buzzing, the sun pouring mercilessly down. It had slipped from the top of the sky and crept in under the patio umbrella, onto her shins. She stood up and tilted the umbrella’s head.

  “Did you know,” Augie said, watching her, “umbrella’s the one word we all say the same—and different from everyone else—we New Orleanians? UMbrella, we say, every last one of us. Yats and Sacred Heart Girls and Creoles, whites and blacks alike. UMbrella. Say it.”

  She sighed, sat, leaned over her legs towards the box of files Joe had tossed together in the office on Esplanade. “Umbrella.”

  “Exactly. UMbrella. That’s how they’d catch you, the FBI, on their wiretaps or what have you. UMbrella. ‘Don’t you go telling me you’re not from N’awlins.’ ”

  UMbrella, her brain said. umBRELla. UMbrella. “At least they’ve stopped calling it N’awlins.”

  “Ain’t dat da truth.” He took a bite of his burger, held it out to her. “Sure you don’t want some?”

  “This was all I wanted.” She toasted him with her wine, gulped at it.

  “You’ve got to eat, you know.”

  “Oh, don’t start.”

  Augie’s hands shot up in surrender, mayonnaise clinging to the wick of his mouth. She pulled out a pile of books—an old DSM, a monograph on Joseph Cornell. On the cover was one of his Hotel boxes, all whitewash and painted wire grill, that looked to her like a prison cell. For some reason, even though Troy had said everything she’d wanted to hear, she was scared worse than she already had been; an image of Cora standing outside a burning house, of Cora with a shotgun at her shoulder, wouldn’t leave her alone. She was going stir-crazy, probably, waiting around for something that wouldn’t come. She saw it constantly in her patients, the desperate scramble to find alternatives when all roads were closing down. They fought hard not to be trapped with the one truth they could not admit.

  “It’s just frustrating. Being here,” she said. She swept her hand around at the patio. Laura’s dying plants she had neglected watering, the windows crammed with all of her and Joe’s furniture. “I woke up this morning thinking—the insurance man is coming today, at least we can get a start. And then the rest of everything fell on me again like a load of bricks.”

  “I understand.” He put the hamburger back down. “Listen. Why not, after you’ve done with the bureaucracy, pack a little bag? Just a few nights’ clothes, whatever essentials you need. Come take a vacation with me on Felicity Street.”

  She pushed the hair back off her forehead. “I can’t come stay with you. Are you kidding?”

  “No.”

  “What if Cora comes home?” she tried.

  “If Cora comes home, then Cora’s okay. Then we can relax. Besides, Del is here.”

  UMbrella, her brain said. UMbrella UMbrella. “She hasn’t been.”

  “But she could be. Isn’t that ostensibly why she came back from New York? To help?”

  Tess shook her head, thinking of the one short text she’d gotten in response to the five voice mails she’d left: taking care of Papie today. see you soon. Del saw the prison cell too, and she was climbing as fast as she could towards that tiny square of blue sky. “She’s helping her father, Augie.”

  Augie shrugged his shoulders, picked up his hamburger again. She pulled out the insurance file and put it to one side with the files on the mortgage. To the other side went the files on the girls’ colleges, the file of vital documents.

  Her phone rang, and she scrambled for it. Del.

  “Speak of the devil,” Augie said.

  “Hey, Mom!” She sounded so sunny, so pleased with herself, Tess wanted to hit her in the mouth.

  “Where have you been?”

  “I was at Tina’s, as you know. And now I’m across the lake, as you also know. Anyway, I—”

  “Del, I want you to tell me something,” Tess interrupted. “Why would you leave me here when you knew the police were coming? When I needed you, to answer questions about your sister. About the fire. Why would you run away like a fucking criminal?”

  “What?”

  “They confirmed Reyna’s identity this morning. Troy called to tell me. And there’s no evidence of arson. So, I’m confused about why you implied there was.” Too long a pause intervened before Del responded, and Tess imagined her rolling her eyes. “Did you see her do it? Did you help?”

  “Help?”

  “Adelaide Boisdoré, tell me the truth!”

  Augie threw away his sandwich box, and the kitchen garbage can shut with a bang.

  “What the fuck was that?” Del said.

  “Please.” Tess took a deep breath. “Do you know what happened to your sister? That’s all I’m asking. There’s no danger now in telling.”

  “Danger?” Del’s voice caught in her throat. Relieved, Tess would have written in her notes. Lying, for some reason relieved.

  Augie thumped in from the kitchen, put his hands on Tess’s shoulders. She wrenched away. “Just tell me: did you and your sister burn down that man’s home?”

  “And what if I had?” Del was trying sarcasm now. If she had been in the room, Tess was sure she’d make that ugly moue with her mouth. “What in hell difference would it make? If something’s sick, kill it, right? If something’s dead, bury it. Only way to move on—isn’t that right, Mom? Isn’t that how you do things?”

  And then Del hung up the phone.

  “Arson?” Augie lifted his eyebrows at her. Behind his head was the one thing of Laura and Dan’s Tess liked, a photograph of a house at night overhung by an old cypress, the word Annunciation scrawled in the corner. “That’s pretty unlikely, don’t you think? Didn’t Troy say the police have ruled it out?”

  She stormed out into the heat again, letting the screen door clap shut in his face, but he was right behind her, and he opened it again, calmly as a priest.

  “I know you’re still worried about Cora. You wouldn’t be much of a mother if you weren’t.”

  She shrugged and let him put his hands on her. She wasn’t much of a mother, then. She had no business being here, in somebody else’s house, with her lover and a gigantic Mardi Gras cup of wine. If she was a good mother, she would be looking for her daughter in diners, motels, truck stops from here to Canada. The problem was, she had given up on Cora just as Del had accused her of doing, and despite all this “sleuthing” as Alice called it, despite these conspiracy theories, what she really expected was that they would find her, if they found her, at the bottom of the lake.

  “Let me help you feel better. However I can,” Augie said, reaching out to rub her back. “There’s a party tonight at Leslie Bain’s house. Would you like to go?”

  Umbrella, she thought. Umbrella, umbrella, umbrella. “Finding my daughter would make me feel better.”

  “Troy hasn’t heard a peep?”

  “I’m pretty sure he thinks she’s dead.” She shook her head. “ ‘It was over for me a good while ago,’ he says. He’s done. Done mourning his sister. Not even worried about his house. Says he’s just going to let the city tear it down.”

  Augie cleared his throat, then looked at her the way she imagined Alice looked at her child-patients when they needed the facts of life explained. “Do you know how many fires there have been since the storm?”

  She pinched the plastic cup of wine and drank, then fell on her knees on the slate, and put her hands in the files. She pulled out the one on the inheritance her mother ha
d left her, marked CORNELIA M. ESHLEMAN SUCCESSION and opened it on the ground.

  “Well, I don’t know either, exactly, but it’s a lot. All the fuse boxes were damaged, the water shifted the wires around. Do you know what knob and tube looks like? When Madge and I renovated Felicity, the wires were just in there—no insulation, just bare wires that crumbled when you touched them, and I’d been sleeping with this stuff behind my head my entire life.”

  “I know what knob and tube is.” She flipped past photographs of her mother’s house on Upperline, her Philadelphia sofa on its Persian rug, the caned chairs in the solarium, the tester bed with the marquetry M on the headboard—M for Marleybone, her mother’s maiden name, under which she had been Queen of Comus. The Marleybones had vanished in a plague of daughters, and soon so would the Eshlemans, she the only child of an only child in this Catholic place where she knew people with upwards of fifty first cousins.

  “Now, imagine what happens when a house hasn’t been cared for by people such as ourselves. Say you can barely cover the telephone bill, and now water rises in the walls. The power’s off, but then it comes back on and—” He made a zapping sound like a child reading aloud from a comic book, then opened up his hamburger box again. “There’s your fire.”

  “I know,” she said. And she knew too that soon there would be no one to care for these houses at all. Already they were gone, and many would not come back. And those that would were not guaranteed to know how to restore any of it to the way things had been. “I know,” she repeated.

  Augie peeled the aluminum foil back from around his potato with a cringe-making squeak. “Then why are you giving Del such a hard time?”