The Floating World

by Babst, C. Morgan

  “Alright.” Troy nodded. Behind him, dusk was drawing closed across the front windows of the house.

  “Need and want are two different things.” Cora had her elbow on the swinging door and a tart shellacked in rose-colored syrup balanced on her hands. She took another step into the dining room and the door batted closed behind her.

  Tess turned to her. “Do you want me to stay?”

  Cora bent down to put the tart on the buffet, her small bosom pressing into her blouse.

  “Do you want to?” She dropped her hair out of its rubber band, did it up again, reached out and plucked a pomegranate seed from the top of the tart and put it in her mouth, cracked it between her molars. For a second, Tess thought she was looking at her twelve-year-old daughter, before the troubles had descended upon them, before anything like this had seemed like a possibility. And wasn’t this what she had wanted for her, even then? A good man. Children. Happiness. But safety wasn’t guaranteed anywhere. She would have to remind her of that before she left—that happiness, no matter how permanent it seemed, was not something created once but made every day on a thousand different occasions when its opposite might also come to be.

  “I do want to,” she said to Cora. “But, now I’ve seen how well you are, there’s so much to take care of. They’re just starting on the house, and I’ve got the claim to do, and we’ve got to get our things into storage before Laura and Dan come home.”

  Cora nodded.

  “But I’ll be back up soon? I can bring you some things. Silver? Would you like the silver? Or furniture? Surely you’ll end up finding your own place to live. Del and I could come up in a van.”

  Cora smiled. In the kitchen, the side door opened, bells clacking against the windowpane, and the boys shouldered in in their boots and puffy jackets.

  “It’s snowing,” they yelled, tromping across the kitchen like a herd of elephants.

  “I told you take those boots off before you track mud on my rug,” Bea said, brooding after them.

  “We don’t need a lot, Mom,” Cora said. “But I appreciate the offer.”

  “We do appreciate it,” Troy said.

  “You heard us? It’s snowing!” Willy took Tess by the hand and pulled her through the dining room, across the foyer, and through the front door.

  It was getting dark out, though it was only four in the afternoon. A blue streetlight shone at the end of the driveway, and flakes of snow spun through it. Willy yanked her down onto the front lawn, and the wind bit through her blouse. Willy, in his fat coat and hat, tilted his face up, stuck out his hands, twirling off down the path. Snowflakes landed, heavy and wet, in her hair, and when she’d reached the end of the driveway, she turned around and looked back at the house, where Cora and Tyrone stood watching through the living room windows, the fire flickering behind them.

  Hibernation, she thought. The bears had it right. Some seasons, we would be better off spending curled in our subterranean burrows. But we never did. Instead, like wolves, we scratched at the frozen carcass of the earth, wound our gaunt bodies through the maze of ice-hung trees, looking out for anything that moved, the remembered taste of hot blood in our mouths. The sleeping ones, we pulled on their hands, saying Get up. Get up! Come suffer!

  Tess nodded to herself. She had had it all wrong.

  “IS THAT SUPPOSED to be some sort of joke?”

  Del, sitting on the newspaper she’d laid out around the hope chest, looked up at her father, silhouetted in the bright doorframe. He was wearing pressed chinos and a striped button-down, and he pointed across the room with a rolled sheaf of papers. She followed the line of his pointing—the Tess Papie had been whittling at was sitting on the side table, wrapped in a toilet-paper wedding gown.

  “Papie,” she said.

  He nodded, his mouth a hard line, and moved across the room, picked up the little sculpture and held her in two hands like something small and helpless, an injured bird or a blind newborn puppy, and laid his thumbs over her eyes.

  In the hall bathroom, the toilet flushed.

  “Well.” Joe held the Lonely Tess out to her, pulling the toilet paper off with one hand. “She is your mother. But I’d rather not have them shoved in my face.”

  Papie ambled out of the bathroom, his pants still undone, and her father hurried up to him, zipped his fly, buckled his belt.

  “I think we’ve been in England today. The war hospital, I guess?” Del said.

  Her grandfather shuffled sideways back to his chair beside the hope chest and picked up the sanding block he’d been using on the new pine bow, not looking at either of them. “But it doesn’t matter. He’s been working.”

  “He’s not going to get any better, you know, honey. In fact, he’s bound to get worse. If the infection comes back, and it might without professional care, he could be dead in the year from sepsis, pneumonia, any number of—”

  “I know, but look,” She pointed down at the rose they’d finished on the chest’s lid, which stood out like a teacher’s work hung on the same bulletin board with students’.

  “I’m putting him in Belle Maison.”

  “You know, Dad, I can stay here with you. Long term. I can help you.”

  He nodded. “I don’t want you to do that for us.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with you. I want it. Me.” She beat her hand on her chest. “I want to see if there’s anything he can still teach me. And if there isn’t, I’m going to find somebody in the city who will.”

  “You’re staying here?” Her father laughed a little bit and shook his head. “Your life is in New York, all of your friends are in New York.”

  “No,” she said, and it was true. The words New York no longer conjured the kitchen table on Sixth Street, the red-lit bars, her friends laughing. New York for her was no longer anything more than the scene from the window at Odessa where she’d watched the coverage of the storm, a park crisscrossed with fences to keep the hobos off the grass, giggling girls in flippy skirts and expensive heels, dripping trees, canvas buildings, an oil-paint sky. Prettiness had seemed valuable, once, and success, but that all seemed so superficial now—a way to survive, not a way to live.

  “I thought you were going to be the president of Sotheby’s.” Her father had turned away from her and was looking down at Papie, who, brow knit, was running the sander rhythmically against the cypress. “Or run the Met. I thought you were going to have an office with Matisses hanging on the wall.” He picked up the chisel from the ottoman, and then lay it back down again like a chess piece he’d decided not to move. “Why would you give all that up?”

  Del opened her mouth to speak and realized her answer wasn’t quite ready. She would have liked it explained, why she was drawn back here, as her father had been in his time, to a place that offered them nothing of practical value, a place that was so actively and so vividly falling apart. Her best answer was that she felt the need to try to fix what was clearly unfixable, to save what was already lost. But it had more to do with the water that hung in the air, the smell of old wood, the rumpus of tubas and drums drifting up from distant avenues.

  “I’m going to make furniture,” she said. “That’s what I’m meant to do.”

  “Meant.” Her father sighed, letting his lips flutter, his hands opening, then closing. “I signed the papers this morning. We’re going admit him on Monday.”

  “We can take care of him here.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not your obligation, baby girl. You’re supposed to have your own family first. You’re supposed to go forward before you have to go back.”

  She shrugged. “Back is forward. Forward is back.”

  “Goddamn.” He chuckled. “You’ve got it bad, don’t you. I didn’t want this for you, Del. I didn’t want you to sacrifice yourself to the ruins.” He threw his hand around the room, over his father’s head, towards the destroyed woods beyond the windows, then threw his arms into the air. “But alright. I give up.”

  “It’s not a
sacrifice,” Del said. It wasn’t an obligation, either. It was hardly even a choice.

  She pulled her notebook out of her sweatshirt pouch and showed her father the sketches she’d made that morning: the cattle-matted grasses in Sol’s pasture, the wisteria wrapped around the pecan tree’s dead boughs. As he read the thing she’d scribbled about the diminishing swamp, the way the marsh grasses grew up over the water to provide the illusion of solid ground, Papie stood and came over, pushing her father aside.

  “Yes, yes,” Papie said, scrabbling for a pencil at the other side of the table. “That’s fine, fine. We could make this line a little sharper though—” And he rubbed his eraser against the paper, penciled in a new and stronger graphite line.

  JOE WALKED AWAY from the house, towards the workshed, the little sculpture of Tess that Del and his father had saved from the fire in his hands. The tree frogs were chirping in what remained of the trees, and their song and the roar of the cars going by on the road were all that was in his head. You couldn’t make a sculpture out of that, and yet he’d promised himself that he would go. He waded out of the moat of light that ringed the house and over the lawn, the flashlight unkindled, and the workshed shrank into the dark grass, as if it didn’t want to be a party to this. He could already hear the buzz of the lights over his workbench as the night slipped through his fingers like dry sand.

  He had never brought dread to his work before. He had never, as others did, allowed a deadline or a sense of duty to make him work. Fuck his professors. Fuck Quincy. Fuck Copenhagen. Even when he wasn’t feeling inspired, he made sure to enter his studio with an open mind, so that, while he polished a finished piece or prepared a block of wood, the muse would be able to come like a little mouse through a crack in the walls. It was important to always have something to distract yourself from the emptiness, if that was your affliction. He was afraid that if he sat down on his stool without anything in front of him, his mind would snap shut like a trap.

  The workshed loomed, a deeper darkness in the dark, and he suddenly remembered that night he and Vin had locked the dog inside of it when they were kids. The neighbors had been talking about hunting it down and shooting it—a hulk of a dog that had been prowling the woods for days. They held it responsible for the carnage at a nearby pheasant coop and thought it was probably rabid, and so when he and Vin had seen it lurking in the trees, they had gotten a piece of meat from the icebox and thrown it into the shed and waited, hiding, until the dog had gone in, then locked the door behind it. They were imprisoning it for its own protection, they told their parents at dinner. The next day they would start training it, and soon enough they’d be able to parade it out, shampooed and flea-collared, to apologize for the pheasants. By the look on his father’s face, though, Joe knew that wasn’t going to happen. If the dog hadn’t chewed up his father’s tools and the couple of old chairs in the workshed yet, he would soon. Animal control would be called.

  That night, lying in bed, Joe had heard the dog crying—a low keening punctuated by the sound of it throwing itself at the door—and so, after Vin had pulled the pillow over his head, he’d gotten up and gone downstairs and out across the lawn and opened the shed. The dog bolted into the trees, a dark smudge in the darkness, and two days later, the neighbor who’d lost the pheasants came by to let them know he’d shot it.

  Now, standing against the wall of the shed with the little ruined wooden thing in his hands, he looked into the cleared forest, knowing that no yellow eyes looked back. He opened the door, flipped on the overhead, watching the dark retreat to the corners of the room. As he put the sculpture—his departed wife pregnant with his departed child—on the workbench, the two pieces of pine sounded their hollowness. How could you make art out of absence? You would not paint black canvasses, make plaster casts of rumpled sheets or emptied clothes. You would not make portraits out of window screen. He groped across the table for his notebook, opened it with its string. Perhaps you would construct abandoned cities out of glass so that you could see inside the beds unmade, the dinners burnt, the houseplants parched in the unremitting sun. You could make empty parks, empty jails, empty restaurants, their empty tables set with hamburgers made of ash and cups of water that trembled as though someone had just fallen in, and as a soundtrack, play over them sound of highways—but it was all too obvious, wasn’t it?

  Of course it was.

  He would have to figure out, then, a way to carve holes in the air, to create a hollow chamber of such utter, intolerable blackness that the viewer would be forced to replace what was gone with whatever he had retained.

  THE KEY AUGIE had given her was shiny, newly cut, and she had to jiggle it a little bit to make it catch the lock. Crickets bowed in the darkness behind her, but inside Duke Ellington was playing from the speakers wired into the walls. Plates clattered in the kitchen. The icebox clapped shut. Tess bumped her suitcase up into the front hall, wheeled it to the bottom of the stairs. The chandelier was back in its place, and plaster acanthus leaves curled around in a gilded medallion.

  She toed her shoes off and padded back down the rewaxed hallway and waited for a moment outside the door to the kitchen. Augie was humming to himself, sipping bourbon from a rocks glass as he drizzled sauce across a roast filet, washed his hands, took salad plates out of the Sub-Zero.

  “A man after my own heart,” Tess said.

  Augie turned on his heel towards her, his blue eyes swimming, his cheeks a little flushed. “You may be right, Mrs. Boisdoré.”

  “Dr. Eshleman to you, Mr. Randsell.”

  She leaned over the counter and kissed him lightly. “You’re too good. How did you know I’d be hungry?”

  He looked at his watchless wrist. “Eight o’clock flight? You’re not the kind to eat a sweaty airport sandwich for dinner.”

  “Maybe not. No,” she laughed. “Definitely not.”

  “Well, how does cold roast beef, salad, French bread, and turtle soup from the Club sound?”

  “You spoil me.”

  Augie shrugged. “Do you know how long it’s been since a beautiful woman surprised me in my kitchen?”

  Tess moved around the counter and plucked a piece of meat from the board, ate it, then sucked the sauce, hot with horseradish, from her fingers.

  “How’s Cora?”

  “Fine.” She shook her head. “Really well.”

  “Then this really is a celebration, isn’t it?” He came behind her, and he took her hair, which, since the storm, had grown out almost to her shoulders, in his hands. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

  She should have looked around at him. She should have turned, knocked his hands down, corrected him. Instead, she picked up a sweet potato from the bowl, felt the weight of it. On the narrow end, beads of blackened sugar stood out against the paper-bag skin, and she could hear Lurlee, her mother’s housekeeper, saying See there? You know it’s a good one if it cried when it came out the ground. Lurlee had smelled of sweet perfume and spray starch. She was probably dead now. At Christmas the year after she’d retired, Tess and her mother had tried to bring her a pecan pie, but no one was home at the yellow house in the Upper Ninth—she could still see her mother’s white-gloved little hand rapping at Lurlee’s door—and they hadn’t tried again.

  “I’ve got something else for us,” Augie said. “If it’s not too late for wine, of course.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t have anywhere to be in the morning, do I?”

  She listened to his footsteps retreat into the rec room, his feet leave wood for carpet, then carpet for wood again as he opened the doors to the built-in bar and crouched down in front of the wine fridge. The first time she’d ever laid eyes on Augie Randsell had been in that room; she had wandered back during a Mardi Gras party and found him sitting on the floor in a circle of Jesuit boys and Dominican girls, playing spin the bottle while a Bobby Vee record played. When Tess looked up at her reflection now in the dark windows, she almost expected to see that shy girl in her party dress with
her curled hair. But she was only herself—a thin-lipped white woman holding a sweet potato, a rigid woman, still as a statue while the gilded world streamed past.

  Bottles clinked delicately as Augie pulled out the shelves, made his selection, closed the door. She settled on a barstool and swiveled around to watch him coming back through the dark room, a decanter in one hand, the bottle cradled against his chest like a baby.

  He went around the island and rummaged for a corkscrew, keeping the label turned to him even as he peeled the foil off the bottle’s neck.

  “I felt like we deserved something special,” he said.

  “Something wonderful?” She raised her eyebrows at the bottle.

  “Quite possibly.”

  “French, Italian, or American?” He and Madge had used to rent summer houses in Burgundy, Tuscany, Napa, the Loire, but she and Joe had never quite been able to afford to go along.

  “A claret,” he said, looking at her as he withdrew the cork, wet as a bloody towel.

  Joe had always hated the way Augie insisted on calling Bordeaux “claret,” the way he’d hand you a good bottle as if you’d won a prize. Now, Augie took the wine by the neck and turned it towards her—Chateau Léoville-Las-Cases 1982.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “1982 was a beautiful year in Bordeaux.” He tilted the bottle gently over the mouth of the decanter, letting the wine trickle slowly out. “The vineyards were heavy with blossom in the spring, and the summer was hot but with just enough rain to keep the vines happy without making it too easy for them. The harvest broke records. And then, when it came down to the business of drinking it—” He raised the bottle into the light to see how the sediment lay, then carefully poured the rest of the wine into the decanter. “It changed the game.”

  He went to the cabinet and pulled down two glasses with his long patrician hands, and she tried to turn her mind towards whatever this dinner, this bottle meant to him, his ideas on where this all might be leading. It seemed he thought they’d be able to walk, arm in arm, through the lion-surmounted arch on the wine label and onto a blooming vineyard where the weather was always fine.