Sorry for Your Trouble

by Richard Ford

  “Wrong you,” he said.

  “Then buy me a wonderful mask, I adore masks.” She laughed, forgetting about it. “Um-hmm.” She was agreeing with something she was thinking. “I suppose there’s a Mrs. Sandy.”

  His name spoken finally. He had not spoken hers. He was uncertain about it. “My wife,” he said, not loud. “Priscilla.”

  She glanced at him. The brown dress had side pockets into which she put her hands as a gesture of acknowledgment. She had sweated little hemispheres beneath her arms, a shadow on the fabric. Not the right dress for now.

  There was music in the park named for the spoiled president. Jackson. Street musicians were playing horns and pounding drums. People were dancing on the esplanade, sliding off to the side as the two of them passed. Others were having fortunes read under bright umbrellas in the late-day heat. The river was now very close, its smell up and all around, a fragrance like fair taffy. They would go all the way to it and see across to Algiers. The great turn south. What ought they to be talking about in this small time life allowed?

  “There’s a very nice clothing store in town,” she remarked unguardedly. “It’s run by some very nice Lebanese. I visited it today. I bought this dress. Your wife probably shops there.”

  He did not remark. He was wondering if he had thought about her “a lot” in thirty-five years. In some unrealized way, it could be argued he had thought about her every single day. Though he’d thought about many other things as often. To be thinking about something didn’t mean what people said it meant.

  “What sort of law do you do?” She looked at him as if she sensed he might be suffering something. “Do? Do you say that? Do law?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Admiralty.” He was sweating through his shirt. His tie was off and in his pocket. The breeze at the river would refresh everything. But not yet.

  “Boats,” she said to convey admiration.

  “Supertankers,” he said quickly. “Mostly insuring them, replacing them, selling them. Sometimes hauling them off the bottom.”

  “They all want a place to sink, don’t they?”

  “If I’m lucky,” he said.

  “Well, you are,” she said. “You are lucky. Look at you.”

  They were climbing the concrete steps that concluded at a promenade and the river. Three grinning black boys sashayed up beside them, from nowhere. Not threatening anyone, just playful. Tricking. “I know right where you got them shoes,” one of the boys said—gone mischievous and smiling. It was their old trick. Which pleased her. She looked at them, delighted to be near them.

  “On her feet,” Sandy said to shoo them.

  “Aww. Fo’ sho,” the boy who’d spoken said. “Where ya’ll be from?” Letting them go past.

  “Boudreau Parish,” Sandy said. Their old Yat joke.

  “I been there. I been everywhere,” the boy said. They were talking and laughing as they sidled away to trick others.

  THEY WERE AT THE GREAT RIVER NOW, WHERE THE AIR EXPANDED and went outward, floated up and away in a limitless moment before returning to the vast, curving, mythical, lusterless flood. The tumultuous bridges up and to the right. The tiny ferry—a speck midway to the other side. To Algiers. Not the real Algiers. A steadfast baking sweetness swirled landward. And a sound—not one you could hear—more a force like time or something enduring.

  “Oh, my,” she said, clasping her hands in front of her. Her bruise forgotten for now. From somewhere—from nowhere—he heard the riverboat calliope. Grab your coat and get your hat, leave your worries on the doorstep. He scarcely came here, but understood her. He thought of flying home from Iceland, across the snowy lobe of Greenland. He’d imagined then he’d be flying over many countries forever. But he hadn’t. “It makes me want to cry,” she said, wanting to seem—to be—rapt, transported, in awe. “It’s so different than seeing it from my room. It has such volume.” She smiled dreamily, let her gaze rise to the pale sky and south, where there were gulls, a pelican. Blackbirds. “Am I experiencing it correctly?” she asked. “I want to.”

  “It’s all correct,” he said, holding his hot coat over his arm.

  “But there’s a best right way.” She again took the little abrupt breath in.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve just always . . .”

  “You’ve just always what?” Suddenly she was acute, as if he was mocking her again but in earnest. He wasn’t.

  “Always seen it,” he said. “Seen it here. From when I was little.”

  She looked again at the brown, sliding surface as if she hungered for it. In the fractured, shadowless light, the diminished city behind them had ceased to be. She didn’t look as pretty as in the hotel and seemed to sense that and not care what the cost would be. How many things did she not care a trifle about? When she was young it had been her great appeal—less than what she did care for. Now it made her seem rash. Again, he wondered—did he seem the same? “Oh,” she said—just the next thing she thought. “It makes me want to kiss you. Sandy. May I kiss you now?” She turned, her eyes finding his face, as if he’d just arrived. Some other kind of not caring.

  “Not here,” holding his warm seersucker to his chest.

  “So,” she said, beginning immediately to walk, as if he had not disappointed her in the least. “What shall we do to take the place of kissing?” She would sober up now.

  “We’ll just walk along.”

  She nodded, “And so they continued to walk along.”

  THEY WALKED IN THE DIRECTION OF CANAL, AGAINST THE RIVER’S stirring flow—west or possibly south—along the promenade named for the famous mayor. Moon. In the watery late-day breeze a moon was visible—as if waiting, sharing no light with the sky. Taller, newer buildings were ahead—the less gaudy, business parts—where his office was. More tourists were present here. Bums, drinking and taking seats on the riprap, fished with poles in the tilting shallows. A great dark freighter seemed then to appear—from under the bridges—drifting, yawing silently toward the great turn, attended by small boats. It mesmerized him even now. The incisiveness of navigation.

  A tiny plane muttered overhead, not so high above the river’s crown, trailing a banner, wishing all ashore Happy St. Paddy’s. Some bar in the Quarter. Though it was days away, still.

  “It must be nice to be Irish,” she said, sounding disinclined—having not spoken in minutes as they walked. “Not to have to care about anything.” A phone began ringing—more a humming, down in her dress pocket. She did not let on and presently it stopped. He felt relieved and wasn’t sure why. Her limp had mostly disappeared.

  “How do you make ends meet?” he said, a half step behind her in the warm, variable air, his voice hardly heard, conveying authority in that way.

  “What are you asking me?” she said, casting smiling disapproval over her left shoulder, as if it pleased her to disapprove.

  He’d asked but did not so much want to know. He’d been imagining if she’d kissed him, how it would’ve tasted. The anise. The tobacco. The lack of fervor. When she’d been young she’d been easily distracted. Slow to finish a meal. To dress herself. Slow to complete a sentence or to find her way to orgasm. He hadn’t liked it. She only kept photographs of herself. One atop a dead giraffe she’d shot with her father in Africa. Another of her naked on a chenille bedspread—taken by a famous photographer whose name was lost.

  “It was just idle,” he said—regarding having asked what she did. Could she even have heard him with the hot-then-cool, metallic breeze blowing past and the thrust of the freighter completing the famous turn south? He might’ve asked about reading the sagas.

  She’d altered her gait to be more carefree. The limp was gone altogether. “Do you ask all the girls if they’re whores? And do they all deny it. Or just me?”

  “They all do,” he said, accepting the joke she was permitting them. This sweetness had always been available. Not to take each other so seriously when they were being frank.

  “Let’s say—as my non-a
nswer,” she said, almost gaily, “let’s say . . . ummm . . . What I do is, I’m not very adept at making friends of old lovers. They stay lovers, or I don’t like them.” She was still walking ahead. “And I was just thinking about arriving someplace. How much better it is than leaving. I was thinking of someplace else, not this lovely place beside the father of waters. I already said that, I think. But it is romantic that you would ask me how I got on.”

  They passed along now, still not quite a pair, not quite apart—he in his seersucker trousers and blue shirt, jacket in hand; she in her smart dress, tanned legs, tanned arms, and blue shoes, which needed to be Italian. She was sweating at her hairline from drinking. He considered touching her shoulder, coming beside her. He imagined her shoulder would be cool in the heat.

  The business buildings had now come very close, no longer unimportant—crowding in. He could see the very tall one wherein was his office. A streetcar went by. The freighter had slid far past, given its deep tuba noise in triumph and disappeared toward the Gulf. The moving air had taken on a petroleum sting. It had to be six, the beginning of the evening in New Orleans, when shadows cooled into darkness. A small flotilla of green-headed ducks bobbed at the river’s margin in the relaxed wake of the freighter. People—tourists—on park benches watched the two of them walking. A handsome couple always attracted withholding stares. Look. Aren’t they just wrong? We’ve been there. We’ve been everywhere.

  “How’s your father?” he said, coming close now, smelling her. There’d been talk, once, that the two of them would meet. The father and the new boyfriend-of-the-moment. Would the father even be alive? His own was long gone. Though not his mother, alone in the big house on Philip Street, not far from where they were.

  “Oh, Jules is fine,” she said, as if the thought amused her. Or his asking. She let the back of her right hand—not the bruised one—whisper against his trousers’ leg. They could not walk so much farther. Hotels and malls and the convention center lay ahead. “They’re both above ground—at least today,” she said. “Fancy young boys take my mother ballroom dancing and steal her money. Jules lives in the Locarno with his Peruvian wife, where he’s writing a novel. Didn’t you want to do that once? I remember you writing.”

  “Someone else again,” he said.

  “Did we not go to Hog Bay to visit him?”

  “I don’t remember,” he said.

  “Sure you do. I remember. He’s built a school in Kenya. The Peruvian won’t go near it.” A pair of airedales took leave of their young owner and came toward them amiably to conduct an inspection. It was how things happened on the promenade. “Nice dogs,” she said. “Sweet dogs.” He had still not used her name. It made him feel as if some things were understood. Though she had used his. “Isn’t it really hotter than it should be?” she said and fanned her hand.

  “It’s the tropics here,” he said. “This is the way it is.”

  “It’s never the way we want it, is it?” Words were missing again. He remembered how remote she could be just in an instant. The blunt turning away. It was something a cautious father would advocate. He had two daughters, himself. Seventeen and thirteen. Both had remoteness as an ally.

  From away, from the narrow teeming streets of the old quarter, there was the sound of bagpipes again. The parade had made its way back down Chartres. They would miss it. Drums were pounding. Blue police lights flashing. “Ha. No bagpipes, please,” she said. “It’s far too late for that.” It was another joke she knew.

  “Are you still Barbara?” he said. Miss Nail. Alix. Who was she? He felt excluded for asking.

  The airedales had followed them, their owner calling from behind. “Lulu and Gracie. Don’t run away.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Barbara.” She turned toward him in the midst of the now-more-crowded promenade. The river was a background photo. “Why?” She was radiant, as if she would quickly laugh. Her wonderful eyes.

  “Just seems inevitable I should know.” He remembered, or misremembered, that she’d been born in Kansas City. At least she’d said that years ago. It made as much sense as anything. Was this responding to her in a new way? “I remember you said, how good it was to be us.”

  “And you said I only meant how good it was to be me.”

  “Correct.” And just as quickly they were having a small “word.” In public. In view of others.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I think about you. Not very often. In New York last summer, I saw a you crossing a wide street. An avenue. I couldn’t get to you. Of course it wasn’t.”

  He went to New York. He had someone there he saw. Not often. “Probably not,” he said.

  “I thought . . .” she said, but paused. Two people—kids—a girl and a boy passed by, both beautiful, both speaking French. Mais, quand même, quand même. She looked at them as if she understood their conversation, then realized she’d lost what she was about to say. It could’ve been the thing he wanted to know. What she thought. “Maybe,” she said, “it was that that brought me here now. Almost seeing you but not really.” She brightly smiled. It may have been close to what she was about to declare. She seemed prepared to laugh again.

  “I’m sure it was,” he said.

  “Would you go away with me?” she said. “I’ve never made anybody very happy. But I always thought I could make you happy—if I decided to. It’d be a challenge.” Her smile was brilliant, no hint of sadness. “You look younger than I look.”

  “That’s not true,” he said.

  “And I’d still like to kiss you.” The dampened wind unsettled her hair. She gave her head a tiny shake that freshened her smile.

  He stopped walking in order to take full enough notice of her. And to kiss her. Far beyond, in the city’s cluster, the Monteleone sign sat atop its white rectangle. From any window someone would see the two of them. Anonymous but interpretable. Farther down the promenade, he spied the priest, in a new bright yellow shirt and jeans, seated on a bench beside a younger man.

  He stepped close, put his hand where he’d wanted to put it—on her bare shoulder, where she was indeed unaccountably cold. “Yes,” he said and kissed her, leaning in to her as she rose in her blue shoes to meet being kissed. She smelled sweet—the anise, vaguely of a cigarette.

  LATER, AS THEY WALKED BACK DOWN INTO THE OLD STREETS, she became talkative, as if something—more than their kiss—had freed a spirit in her, and they were together as they once had almost been. In Iceland. He’d begun thinking rather freely of his old law-school professor who’d died young. He’d been the adored and constant focus of everyone’s attention, admiration, interest. Though in almost no time, people stopped talking about him. Professor Lesher. He’d had the terrible nervous tic. Was brilliant. Briefly, then, he’d thought of his father, who’d left the family and, if truth were told, never came back; lived his life in other cities, with other people. A great error. Though then the wound closes.

  “What’s happened to you, Sandy?” Barbara said. “What would you say the outcome’s been?” She’d forgotten about asking him to go away with her. They were on Iberville Street, nearing the corner where they’d begun. The storied old pile where she was a guest.

  “I’m not that kind of lawyer,” he said, knowing this wasn’t her question nor the answer to any question. “We try to avoid outcomes if we can.”

  “My view is . . .” she said quickly, holding his arm. She’d stumbled on a broken paving, scuffed her knee, ruined her pretty shoe. He had his coat on again. Not his tie. “You, in particular, try very hard to be complicated. While I try very hard to be simple.” She pressed close in against his arm, as if for protection. It was not easy now to walk in her shoes. Though you wouldn’t walk barefoot in the French Quarter. When she’d regained her room (if there was a room), she’d put these shoes in the trash. “You have a bull’s-eye tattooed on your heart,” she said. “It’s not complicated.”

  “I disagree,” he said. It wasn’t true.

  “Would you like to make love to
me,” she said altogether casually. There was the calliope starting once more, behind them at the river. Some Beatles’ song he couldn’t remember the name of.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “All those things I taught you. They get practiced on someone else, I suppose.” She was just going on. She again made her quick little gasp of breath.

  They had come to the revolving door, where they’d stepped out into the heat an hour ago or less. The big, blue-uniformed doorman, with gold braid and epaulettes, stepped forward, smiling, pushing the doors along. “All right, all right.” A rush of cold air escaped. Inside, the lobby was crowded still, and bright with people milling and loudly singing. All the things she’d taught him was a far too dense subject to commence now, though she had never made him happy or tried to. For him, the same. He had merely, briefly, almost loved her quite a long time ago.

  He stood out of her way, touched her shoulder again as she left his arm. He had said her name once but did not say it again. “Some other time,” she said, somewhat unsteadily, the glass doors turning. She had meant possibly something else. Though anything she said now would do.

  “Yes,” he said, as she went in through the circling doors, and he turned for his walk—not so far—up Canal.

  ON THE DRIVE UPTOWN, WHERE HE WAS MEETING HIS WIFE AND others—he would be late—he entertained another thought regarding his father. He’d last visited him in the handsome house his father had purchased on Lakeview, on the near north side of Chicago—there, with his new wife Irma. His father had fancied one of the old stepped brownstones. A bay window and an oriel with stained glass. It was October. The lindens and beeches were in their array across the park. His father was by then representing an Irish firm that made kitchen ceramics. He’d had enough of lawyering. He would live two more years and die climbing steps into an airplane. Completely happy.

  “I couldn’t live in that city one more minute,” his father had said, meaning New Orleans. “It wasn’t your mother’s fault. There was no Irma then. We just had nothing more to say to each other, hadn’t in years. Yes, I know. So what? But. I just became . . . what’s the word . . . de-fascinated. It won’t make sense to you. I hope it never does.”