Under a few more stapled sheaves of paper, she found the appraisal she’d been looking for of all the antiques in their house. She flipped to the back page to remind herself of the exact number—2.25 million dollars—a figure that had been comforting before they’d had to leave it at the mercy of the heat and the water and the thieves. There was no one left who even knew how to repair any of it anymore.
“Not anymore,” she said.
“Because she hung up on you. I’m no shrink, my dear, but I think you’re transferring.”
“No, I mean, this stuff—” She threw her hand at the windows, the back of an étagère, a Victorian chaise. “—it’s not worth shit anymore.”
“Hardly. That’s not just stuff,” Augie said. “Never has been. Anyway, you’re insured.”
The doorbell rang.
“Speak of the devil.” Augie said again. “Listen. I’ll go let him in. Give him some ice tea. You compose yourself. Pack a bag. Think about if you feel like going to Leslie’s tonight.”
“Alright.”
“Good. Alright.”
BRIGHT BODIES OF flame sprang from the torn garbage bags and into the small branches of the templed pines. Joe stood leeward of the brush pile, mesmerized—how the broad-winged fire flared up, shaking its feathers, only to vanish and rematerialize in a different form.
He remembered creeping to his bedroom window one St. Joseph’s Night when he was a very small child, awakened by the sound of bells. Looking down into the street he saw a masker coming, alone, dressed in deep orange plumes like a magnificent bird of God. The man’s suit rustled in the night air, picking up flecks of light from the houses and the streetlamp that flickered at the end of the block, and Joe had held his breath against the power of it. There had been no singing, only the bells shaking at his ankles, the tambourine rustling at his hip as the man walked home, but Joe’s feet began to move now in the grass, tapping to the old Indian song in his head, a music to set fires by. Shallow water, oh mama. Shallow water, oh mama! He blew out a long breath, listening to the steam hiss from the branches.
When you go outside, my son.
Said you might have to go out in the rain.
— I know.
But don’t you bow down.
— No no no no.
On that dirty ground.
He tapped his foot as something clattered inside the brush pile, something made of glass.
He’d set the fire to windward so that the breeze, gusting now from the south, would become a blowtorch, gathering the intense heat from the center of the bags he’d filled with his sculptures of Tess and drenching the tree trunks in it, so that even soaked from last night’s rain they wouldn’t fail to go. And they were going. Crackling and spitting as the bark rolled back and the branches split and the smoke turned black and dense with sap.
The fire was so loud, he didn’t hear Del until she was at his side—come as she’d said she would so that he could spell her at the hospital, her body incurved and ill with sitting among the nurses—and then he didn’t turn to her. He only extended his hand from his side, which she took, silently, and held for a moment before dropping it, dropping her head.
She stepped forward, and he saw then what she saw: the garbage bag melted away around the sculptures of her mother, its black residue clinging to their scorched faces, the bag’s red tie lying wilted across them like a second-prize ribbon. Shallow water, oh mama. Shallow water, oh mama!
The high, crossed poles of the pines were going gray and brittle as they burned, and Joe thought to hold Del back as she moved toward the fire, but he knew he couldn’t bear it if she wrenched her arm away. Her face turned from the flames, she reached out her hand and, one by one, took the sculptures that had tumbled away to the ashy edge of the blaze and stood them in the grass—her mother sitting rigid in her desk chair, her mother lying on pillows, her mother bending over and reaching her hand out to an absent child. Side by side, their extremities singed, the sculptures looked like ruins —which was, of course, what they were.
“I’m sorry, Del,” he said. “I couldn’t look at them anymore.”
Del nodded her head at him, but her face was turned to the sculptures in the grass, her hands pressed against her knees.
“All along I was hoping for better, you know,” he said. “I thought—I suppose I thought we were getting somewhere.”
When you go outside, whispered the silent chief in his head. I said you might have to go out in the rain.
“I knew—” he said, “I mean I thought that if we kept our heads down, kept moving, we’d find ourselves in some kind of Promised Land, laughing as we cut our steaks with your mother’s silver, as we drank the good wine.”
Del was shaking her head. She’d picked up one of the sculptures—her mother looking over her shoulder at him in the doorway to their bedroom, as if his being there was a surprise. Shallow water, oh mama. Shallow water, oh mama!
Around the fire stood the remainder of the stand of trees that was supposed to be his daughters’ heritage, their branches riffling upward in the heat, as if frightened, and he wondered if they weren’t already setting seed in silent evolutionary panic so that the land would come again to be covered in longleaf pine or if what came next would be different, some invading forest of foreign trees.
“That’s your mama’s world, maybe, baby,” he said. Shallow water, oh mama. Shallow water, oh mama! “But it ain’t ours.”
“No, Daddy,” she said, her brow creased at him as if he’d suddenly lost his mind. “It’s not hers either. It’s not any of ours.”
Don’t you bow down.
— No no no no.
I said I won’t bow down.
LESLIE BAIN’S HOUSE looked just as it had the last time Tess had been there for some birthday party back when Del and Leslie’s daughter Courtney were girls. The oak tree in the side yard hadn’t been touched by the storm, and the earthy smell of its leaves merged with the gathering dusk as Augie and Tess mounted the steps. The front porch had always needed a new coat of paint.
Augie pressed the bell. Beyond the leaded glass, men and women in silk and wool stood holding their drinks in the amber light, and the sound of their talking thrummed through the door. Tess shifted the bottle of wine to her other arm and tried to look comfortable. After all, these were “her people” as her father would have said, and she had been raised to know how to act among them, even as a woman separated from a colored sculptor, showing up to a party on the arm of her best friend’s widower. As Leslie came through her foyer, Tess smiled brightly, raising her fingers in a little wave.
“Tess, lovely.” Leslie embraced her. “You haven’t aged a single day!”
“And you’ve gotten younger.” Tess grinned at her—face-lift, hair dye, a good green dress.
As Leslie pinched her on the arm, she knew she would be taken back. Maybe her father had been right after all. My people? She heard herself screaming in that first argument over Joe. My people? That would include you, I take it? Well, that’s not a club I want membership in anymore. But here she was standing in Leslie Bain’s foyer on Augie Randsell’s arm. It was an old feeling, fitting in—like a ball gown unearthed from a cedar chest that zips up easily over your aged body, whispering, silk on silk, to the girl you had once been. The Boisdorés had never quite accepted her. Her mother, after her father died, welcomed Joe with open arms, but the Boisdorés saw her as yet another manifestation of whatever defect had driven Joe away from cabinetmaking to art and from New Orleans to New York. Tess had never been sure of herself in their home, never known what she’d said to make Sylvia turn sideways in her chair and lift her eyes to God. Tess knew that Sylvia believed Joe guilty of “climbing.” No matter what she wore to their house, no matter what present Tess brought—flowers or cheese straws or spiced pecans—Sylvia had treated her with a sort of condescending deference. She was not allowed to help with the cooking. Only after many years was she allowed to clear.
Now, Leslie had her by the elbow, and
she heard herself laughing, politely, automatically, at whatever pleasantries were exchanged. A few other couples came towards them, hands outstretched, big grins on. This was easy, and wasn’t that a sign of its rightness? It was like lying down in a cast made off your own body, like coming home.
“So good to see you!”
“My gosh, how are you? It was so funny to run into each other out in Houston!”
She smiled back, shook their hands—Mel Bock and his wife Sinny, John and Linda Zimpel.
“So funny!”
“Linda, you wouldn’t believe. Ruth’s Chris, six days after the storm, and everyone you knew was there, wearing the one nice outfit they’d packed.”
“Three shirts, three skirts, six pairs of underwear, one pair of heels.”
“And all the jewelry.”
“And all the jewelry.”
“So funny, how we all thought it was just going to be a long weekend away.”
“An evacuation vacation.”
Tess closed her eyes. An evacuation vacation. She had spent the day after Joe had gone off to New Orleans without her at the subdivision pool with a cup full of the strawberry daiquiri Zizi and Vin kept in old three gallon ice cream tubs in their deep freeze. Then she had shaved her legs, lay in bed with a cold washcloth over her eyes until the puffiness went down. That night at that office-tower Ruth’s Chris, among all the laughing refugees, a cold rush of dread had cascaded down her back as Augie poured her wine. I can’t drink this, she’d thought as he went on about how well Syrah went with steak. It’s wrong to drink this. But it made no difference whether she drank it or not, it changed nothing, and so she raised the glass to her lips.
“Gin and tonic, lots of lime?” Augie asked, squeezing her shoulder.
She nodded and watched him go.
“When Augie said he was bringing you, I was just over the moon.” Leslie’s voice was a few decibels louder than necessary, but that was usually the case. “It has been such a long time.”
“I know!” she heard herself drawl the words. “My goodness, when was it they graduated? Seven years ago now?”
“I think eight?”
“My God, that long?” Sinny exclaimed. “That ages us, doesn’t it? I remember when Allie was just this high.” She waggled her hand near her knee. “Did I tell you? She’s living in Atlanta, running her own design shop. We should all be retired by now, if the world was just.”
“Oh, don’t expect a just world,” Leslie laughed. “We haven’t seen Augie, either, in ages.”
They all looked across the crowd towards where Augie stood, with his head bent, talking to the uniformed bartender. Dr. Grunnel, passing behind him, slapped him twice, solidly, on the back.
“When we saw you two, as we were saying, at Ruth’s Chris in Houston,” Mel said, “I thought for a second I was dreaming. I hadn’t seen Augie, except at the Club, in years. Just dropped off the earth. You couldn’t drag him out of Felicity Street with a grappling hook.”
“He seems so much better,” Linda nodded. “Healthier.”
“Madge’s death was hard on all of us.” Tess looked at her toes. “Mourning takes time.”
“Yes, Dr. Eshleman,” Leslie said. “But five years?”
“We haven’t even seen him at the Rex luncheon,” John said.
“Honestly, I think it was the storm did it,” Leslie said. “The change in scene, even his mother’s passing. I think it liberated him.”
“Mrs. Randsell never did stop wearing black for August Senior,” Mel said.
Sinny was nodding heartily. “I myself feel—I don’t want to say better—but more energetic, I don’t know, less ennuieux, since the storm. There’s work to do now. Don’t you feel it?”
“And of course, he must be taking great comfort in you.” Leslie gave Tess a toothy smile.
“We’re propping each other up. We’ve been friends a very long time.”
Tess looked for Augie again, but he was saying hello to Chris Walsh, who took Augie’s hand in one hand and his forearm in the other and shook violently, his madras jacket swinging open. The last time she’d seen Chris, whom she’d known since they were twelve, was at an estate sale by the park. He had been holding a Famille Rose lamp, and, when Joe said hello, he only nodded, didn’t even put the lamp down. Now, Chris’s eyes scanned the crowd, and he saluted her.
“I hear you had a tree,” Leslie said.
Tess swiveled her head back towards the conversation. “Oh, the tree. Yes.”
“I’m sorry.” Leslie, with furrowed brow, reached out to put a hand upon her arm.
“About the tree?” Tess said, though she would have liked to add Or do you mean my marriage? Or my daughter? Augie, suddenly out of his shell, must have explained it all.
“Where are you again?” John Zimpel saved her, and she felt herself smile the sickening smile she’d developed when Cora had started at Buckner and she’d been thrown in with “her” people again, a smile that said I know you mean well, but let’s not pretend.
“Esplanade and Royal.”
“Oh?” Sinny knit her brows, as if the Marigny were another country.
“Mmm. Which one?”
Tess smiled. John taught architectural history.
“Not the Gauche House, obviously,” he said. “That’s Matilda.”
“No, just across.”
“Royal?”
“No, Esplanade.”
“Oh, beautiful building. Gorgeous, gorgeous building. I’ve always wanted a peek inside.”
“If there’s anything left by the time we get it patched up again, I’d be glad to have you over.”
“If you need any help on the restoration—” He reached into his back pocket for a card, and Linda swatted him on the arm. “What? Who you gonna call?” He did a little dance.
“She was asking us over socially,” Linda said. “She doesn’t need you in there telling her her steam shower is historically inaccurate.”
“We would love to come by,” John said. “I promise I will pass no judgments on your shower.”
“Well, that would be so nice.”
“Lovely,” Linda said.
“Wonderful,” John said.
John was describing her house to the others—double galleries, late classical, a wonderful oculus above a curved stair, dentil molding—things he must have read about in some book or archive, and Tess tried to picture this little crowd on her sofa, Augie in Joe’s armchair, cheese straws in a silver dish and Sazeracs all around. She had taken the café brûlot set from her mother’s after she died, the silver chafing dishes, the vegetable servers and long table cloths, but most of it had never come out of the sideboard. With Joe, there had been crawfish boils, intimate dinners with loaves of crusty whole wheat bread, evenings when they listened to music in the yard, drinking their beers straight from the bottle. The girls had had birthday parties, of course, with water balloon fights and chocolate doberge cake, and she had hosted small Thanksgivings, just the two girls, she and Joe, Joe’s parents, and had had Augie and Madge or Andy and Tim over for dinner, but she had never entertained the way her parents had. No one arrived at her door in cocktail dresses and black tie, ready to trim the tree, there was never dancing or confetti, and now the oculus above the stairs was cracked, and in two days the men would start ripping the plaster down. She imagined the Zimpels and the Bocks and Leslie Bain sitting in the dark on the damp cushions of the sofa, fanning themselves, not speaking as they pressed iced drinks against their cheeks.
“You know, I don’t think I’ve set foot in a single house on Esplanade,” Sinny was saying.
“Oh?”
“No! I’ve kept to the American side.” She looked to John for approval. “The Garden District—you can still just see the twitchy Victorian ladies pruning their roses—but there’s something so much more romantic about the French section, wouldn’t you say? I guess I’m getting it out of Chopin, but Esplanade makes me think of octoroon mistresses in their bustles walking the parlors. Visiting
cards, a cone of sugar, the moustachioed colonel coming to call.”
The others were quiet, and Leslie glanced at Tess with what looked like pity on her face.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Sinny said. “I didn’t mean—”
“Oh, not to worry,” Tess laughed, though she wasn’t sure whether Sinny even knew what she’d meant. Now, it was Cora and Del in their parlor, sitting awkwardly in bustles, cooling themselves with reticulated ivory fans. “It’s an old-fashioned word, but accurate in its way. Mixed-race, we’re supposed to say now.” She nodded.
“I suppose we’re all an eighth something or other,” John said.
“One eighth English, a quarter French, half German, one sixteenth Irish, one thirty-second Cherokee, one sixty-fourth Dutch, one one-hundred-twenty-eighth Russian, one one-hundred-twenty-eighth Scots,” said Linda, folding down her fingers one by one.
“And all New Orleanian,” Sinny said in triumph.
Augie had made his way back across the crowd, holding two lime-choked gin and tonics, and he shouldered across John and gave her her drink.
“All ‘Creole’ means, after all, is ‘homegrown’,” Leslie said.
Tess sipped at her drink.
THE CURTAIN DRAWN up around the bed quavered in the cold draft. Left the door open again, damn them, as if they didn’t know there were sick men here—men like him who couldn’t move their arms under the sandpaper sheets—or didn’t care.
Seemed like you couldn’t get the sea out of your bones. Its queasy motion and the cold of it. It wasn’t the kind of sea he’d grown up on, warm and enveloping like a woman’s body, like it was meant to take you in. No different from you, just separate—98.6 and the soft sand yielding between your toes, the minnows come up to nuzzle. We were all sea creatures once, or so they said, and despite yourself you had to believe that more than a story about a snake and an apple and a flaming sword. Come up from monkeys they said. Well, hee hee hoo. He bared his teeth. So what if we do.
To disparage the body, though, was to misunderstand it. How your blood slows to keep you ticking while you wait, tied up in a piece of floating something in the gray sea. How it keeps on ticking, patient as a clock. Patient, patient. Better than to sink whole to the bottom of the ocean. Some of them did that too.
The Floating World Page 34