by Cathy Holton
“Well, you know what they say,” Eadie said, yawning. “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.”
“Remind me to smack you the next time I see you.” Lavonne went online to check the e-mails on her Shofar So Good Deli website. She scrolled down the list, holding her cell phone against her ear with one shoulder.
“About the wedding,” Eadie said, dropping her legs and rolling over on her stomach. “Are you sure it's okay if I stay with you? Are you sure Ashley won't mind?”
“Ashley's on winter break and Louise doesn't go back to Tulane until next week. They're down in Florida with Leonard and his trophy wife.”
“Funny, you don't sound bitter. Why don't you sound bitter?”
Lavonne grinned. “Because now the trophy wife's stuck with Leonard. And I'm not.”
From deep within the house, Eadie could hear whispering. In French. She turned her head to listen, and after a minute, it stopped. “I think my house is haunted,” she said. She was pretty sure it was a child. She had, several times, caught something small and fleeting out of the corner of her eye. “Lights go on and off. I hear whispering all the time, like someone is standing behind me and when I turn around, there's no one there. Sometimes I hear footsteps on the stairs.”
“What does Trevor say?”
“He says I'm crazy. He says I spend too much time shut up in the house, alone.”
On the other side of the wall, the old mixer made a wump, wump sound as it mixed the dough. Lavonne could hear Little Moses Shapiro, her partner's son, moving around the kitchen, taking bread loaves out of the ovens and sliding them onto the cooling trays. “Look, Eadie, I've got to go. We're catering Nita's wedding and I've got a lot to do before next Saturday. E-mail me your flight plan and I'll pick you up at the airport on Wednesday.”
“Is Nita having a bachelorette party?”
“She says she doesn't want one. She's acting kind of weird about the whole thing. I'm starting to think she might be getting cold feet.”
“What do you mean? Is something wrong with her and Jimmy Lee?”
“Oh no, they're as happy as ever. I just get the feeling she doesn't want to get married. I don't know, I could be wrong.”
“Well, let's you and me take her out to Bad Bob's and see if we can ply her with tequila and find out what's going on.”
Lavonne said, “Well, that might be a problem since Bad Bob's is no more. Two guys named Thom and Petor moved down from Atlanta and bought the place. They decorated it to look like a New York loft, put up a screen of trellises to hide the concrete plant, and built a deck overlooking the river. Now it's a wine bar called Malveux Robert.”
“Shit, what's happening to that town?”
“You'll see when you get here,” Lavonne said, and hung up.
EADIE HUNG UP THE PHONE, YAWNED, AND ROLLED OVER IN BED. The house was quiet again. The ghost had gone. The rain had stopped and the sun now peeked from behind a bank of low clouds, slanting through the long windows. A patch of blue sky appeared above the neighbor's roofline. They had bought the house on Prytania Street soon after they sold Trevor's ancestral home in Ithaca and moved to New Orleans. Most of their furniture was still in storage back in Georgia, and except for the bedroom, the kitchen, and the library, the mansion was empty. They had gambled that everything would work out over their first year there. That was all the time Trevor had given himself to finish his novel.
“If it doesn't work out, we can always go back to Georgia,” he said. “I can always go back to practicing law. And you can work anywhere. It doesn't matter where we live.”
But, apparently, it did. There were art galleries all along Magazine Street and Eadie told herself that she would work again, but instead she fussed over Trevor like an overbearing mother. She would wake him every morning and bring him café au lait in the garden, watching anxiously from the French doors until he began, tentatively at first, and then with a steady tapping of his fingers over the keyboard, to write. He would break for lunch and then go back to the garden. Eadie would allow no one to visit until four o'clock in the afternoon, cocktail hour in New Orleans, and then the garden would be crowded with neighbors and college professors and lawyers who had graduated from Tulane but never practiced law a day in their lives. Gradually, Eadie succumbed to the easy charm of the place, the dusty bookstores along Carrollton Avenue, the cafés of Maple Street, the bon vivant attitude and wit of the people she met at cocktail parties and art galleries and book signings. A general feeling of sloth and lassitude overtook her. She set up her studio in the dining room but kept the door closed and locked. Instead, she began to take long naps in the afternoon.
Trevor, on the other hand, seemed energized by the place. He worked feverishly, and after two months had a rough draft of the novel, a legal thriller, completed. By then he had landed an agent, based on his outline and the first three chapters. Four months later he had signed a two-book contract with Random House. It had all gone as perfectly and predictably as a Hollywood movie plot. The novel was due out in May and Eadie had no doubt it would become an overnight bestseller. That was the way her luck was running these days.
In a little over a year, Trevor had become a local Literary Figure. He had succumbed completely to the siren's song of adulation and praise. Eadie was consumed by jealousy, not of the women who threw themselves at her husband at cocktail parties and gallery openings, but of the fact that Trevor could work and she could not.
And now, lying in the house on Prytania Street and yawning in her antique bed, Eadie was overcome by a numbing sense of boredom.
Jealousy and boredom. Always a dangerous combination for Eadie Boone.
NOW THAT HER WEDDING WAS LESS THAN A WEEK AWAY, NITA was not even sure she wanted to get married again. She sat out on the screened porch drinking coffee in the mornings after Jimmy Lee had gone to work and the children had left for school, wondering if she was doing the right thing. Steam rose off the surface of the Black Warrior River and catfish the size of terriers splashed in the dark pools between the cypress trunks. Nita loved the quiet isolation of the place, their little cabin in the woods. Jimmy Lee had bought it soon after she left Charles Broadwell for good and moved in with him. She brought her two children with her, Whitney and Logan. They liked to take the boat out on the river or feed the catfish from its pine-strewn banks. In the summer, they swam in the dark water, cavorting like otters, enjoying themselves in a way they had never done when they lived in the big house in River Oaks with its kidney-shaped swimming pool. Jimmy Lee hung a rope swing from the top of a tall tree and watching the three of them swing out over the water, laughing and twirling and kicking their feet, Nita realized she had what she had always wanted—a happy family.
They lived simply and frugally on the money Jimmy Lee made as a self-employed carpenter. The children went to public school now and seemed much happier than they ever were attending the prestigious Barron Hall School. Nita herself had gone back to school, taking classes at the small college in town where she was trying to decide whether to major in elementary education or women's studies. The money she had taken from Charles Broadwell sat untouched in her bank account, insurance against Charles ever filing a custody suit to take the children away from her. Her love life with Jimmy Lee, thirteen years her junior, was passionate and intensely satisfying. All in all, Nita's life was turning out to be everything she had ever dreamed it could be, and she was hesitant to upset that delicate, happy balance by marrying Jimmy Lee.
Already there were ominous signs. He had begun to hint at fatherhood although Nita had told him that, at forty, and with her own children nearly grown, she did not want more children. He said he understood, but she saw the way he looked at young mothers pushing babies in the grocery store. And lately he had begun to grumble about money, to insist, despite her assurances to the contrary, that a man with a family must do more to provide for them than work as a self-employed carpenter.
Nita, who was writing a college research paper on the historie
s of black women who worked as domestics in the South in the 1930s and 1940s, had begun to question how long her happiness would last. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons she went out to the Suck Creek Retirement Home with her tape recorder and notebook and boxes of chocolate that she handed out to the women she interviewed. There she heard tales of social injustice and love gone bad, stories of the cruelty of nature and the capriciousness of fate. Immersing herself in the histories of these sad women made Nita realize how fleeting and illusionary moments of genuine happiness can be, and she could not shake the feeling that her happiness, too, was doomed to failure.
But then Jimmy Lee would come home from work and take her in his arms, and she would forget all that. Then her doubts would be nothing more than a slight gnawing sensation in the pit of her stomach. She would go about the small cabin planning her wedding and feeling like she was pushing something large and heavy up a hill, and if she stopped, it would roll back down and crush her. She hurried through her days. The flowers were ordered. The menu was decided upon. She loved Jimmy Lee and she knew he loved her. But there was a part of her, a cynical part born of sixteen years of marriage to Charles Broadwell, which knew that a wedding ring is not always the blossoming of a love affair.
Sometimes it's the death knell.
ONCE SHE HAD SWINDLED HER EX-HUSBAND, LEONARD, OUT OF his dream home and embarked on her career as a small-business owner, Lavonne Zibolsky was amazed at how quickly success came. In a little over a year, she and her business partner, Mona Shapiro, had increased the revenue of their Shofar So Good Deli thirty percent, and had even turned a small profit in their first year. Which was pretty good considering the amount of equipment and advertising they had bought, not to mention the expensive website they had paid a company out of Atlanta to design. Leonard's participation in all this had, of course, been forced, which was unfortunate but unavoidable, given the circumstances. Survival of the fittest was applicable not only to Darwinian theory, it would seem, but also to matrimony. Lavonne was the only divorced woman she knew whose standard of living had not gone down after the divorce, and it was only because she had been willing to do whatever was necessary to protect herself before the first petition was filed. She had taken the steps necessary, however unethical, morally questionable, or potentially criminal they might be, to ensure that she didn't spend her golden years living in a mobile home eating Feline Delight for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Besides, Leonard had only gotten what he deserved.
She stood at the counter of the Shofar So Good Deli on a rainy Tuesday morning, contemplating this. Lavonne used to daydream about moving to the south of France with Leonard after the girls were grown. She used to daydream about writing a series of travel cookbooks. But perhaps a book on protecting yourself financially from bad husbands might be more timely.
The bell on the front door tinkled and Lavonne looked up and smiled at two tourists who entered carrying I Survived Shopping in Ithaca bags. The tourist trade accounted for most of the deli's sales. They drove down from Atlanta by the busloads to tour the quaint town and antebellum homes that Sherman had somehow forgotten to burn on his March to the Sea.
Lavonne said, “Can I help you?” Her business partner, Mona Shapiro, was on a Caribbean cruise with a group of widows from the synagogue. It was her first vacation in nearly fifteen years.
“I think we'll have lunch,” the woman said, eyeing the menu board on the wall behind Lavonne. The man shook his umbrella out and put it in the stand and then took the woman's raincoat and hung it over the back of a chair.
“Let me know when you're ready,” Lavonne said. “The soup of the day is tomato artichoke.”
Little Moses came out of the back of the store. He had cleaned himself up recently, had cut his dreadlocks and now wore his hair short. He still sported a lip ring and the tattoo of a serpent on his forearm, but all in all, his appearance was much improved over what it had been when Lavonne first met him and the rest of his Jewish reggae band, Burning Bush. The band had moved away from their Jamaican roots and was more into the blues now. They were talking about moving to New Orleans. Eadie had offered to let them stay with her in her rambling mansion in the Garden District.
“Hey, can you cover for me up front?” Lavonne said. “I've got some work I need to do in the back.”
“Sure.” He grinned and went up to the counter to take the tourists' order.
Lavonne took off her apron and went into the small office to work on payroll reports. It was her least favorite thing to do but she was finding that success carried its own price. She worked fifty hours a week in the store, and an additional two to four hours on the weekend helping with the catering business. She had also begun contemplating possible franchise opportunities, and now she sat up late every night in bed alone with her laptop computer, researching the possibility of further expansion. She had bought a small house over in the Historic District of Ithaca, which she shared with her Jack Russell terrier, Winston, and, sporadically, with her daughters, Louise and Ashley. Leonard had moved to Atlanta to practice law soon after Boone & Broadwell went down in flames among rumors of shady real estate deals and something unsavory to do with the partners themselves. Louise was a freshman at Tulane and Ashley had graduated early from the Barron Hall School and had left home for the University of Georgia. All in all, Lavonne lead a somewhat fulfilling, if lonely, existence.
And there were advantages to being a workaholic. Her weight, for instance. After nearly twenty years as an obese housewife, she now weighed seventy-five pounds less than she had when she was married to Leonard. Not that this had made much difference in her personal life. The truth was, she was forty-seven years old and she hadn't had a date in twenty-two years. The idea of having to hold her stomach in and shave her legs on a regular basis, not to mention the disturbing prospect of a bikini wax, was enough to make Lavonne contemplate permanent celibacy.
Still, there were times when she missed the companionship of having a man around. Then she would daydream of having someone to go to dinner with, someone who could take her to flea markets on the weekends or out to the Whistlin' Dixie Drive-In for the Friday-night double feature, someone who could appreciate her sense of humor and the fact she played a mean hand of euchre.
Lavonne had her nearly grown daughters, her successful business, her laptop computer, and Winston, and now, if she could only figure out something to do about the loneliness, her life would be just about perfect.
AFTER LUNCH, EADIE SHOWERED AND WENT OUT INTO the garden to do yoga and try to meditate. The rain had washed the air and left it cool and clean and damp. Sunshine filtered through the branches of the live oaks and pooled in brilliant puddles across the bricked patio and the lush green lawn. She tried to imagine herself floating on a white cloud. She tried to concentrate on her breathing, but it was no use. Her mind jumped about from subject to subject. What was it the Buddhists called it? Monkey mind? Her monkey mind was loose and it was horny as hell. There was no use denying it. The scenes Eadie was conjuring in her mind had less to do with white fluffy clouds and more to do with the Kama Sutra. Being in love with her husband wasn't working out.
Being in love with Trevor Boone, the next literary golden boy, wasn't what she had expected. It was only a matter of time before fame found him and then she would lose him completely to an adoring public who would listen with rapt attention while he gave his opinion on everything from literary symbolism to the effects of global warming on emerging weather patterns. It wasn't too hard to imagine. He would travel the country on publicity tours and he would, of course, offer to take her with him. But she wouldn't go, because what could be more depressing than watching Trevor fulfill a lifetime dream while she hadn't been able to work in over a year? When it was all she could do just to drag herself out of bed every morning? How pathetic and sad would that be?
Eadie wrenched her Monkey Mind back to the present. She tried not to think about loneliness and the delights of the flesh. On the sidewalk beyond the wr
ought-iron fence young mothers pushed baby strollers on their way to the park, and groups of Catholic school children in plaid uniforms straggled by on their way home from school. The distant streetcars whirred along St. Charles, clanging their warning bells at every block. Eadie closed her eyes and tried again to concentrate on her breathing. She had only recently taken up meditation and like so much else in her life, it just wasn't working out. It was too slow and sedate for Eadie, too introspective. And she didn't like the way her mind would suddenly veer off into strange dimensions, traveling down dark pathways she had long ago ceased to visit, and didn't want to revisit now.
She opened her eyes. Blinked. Dappled sunlight filled the garden. Above her the old live oaks spread their branches protectively, pushing their massive roots up through the bricked sidewalk, ancient veterans of hurricanes and floods and civil war.
She closed her eyes again and tried to concentrate on her breathing. In, out. In, out. But it was hard to do when hungry. She should eat something, she decided, something good, something healthy, but she wasn't sure what. Maybe some fish. Maybe a po' boy sandwich. She could walk down to the po' boy restaurant on the corner of Magazine and Valmont.
But walking down to the corner restaurant would have less to do with a po' boy sandwich, she knew, and more to do with the twenty-two-year-old art student who worked behind the counter.
His name was Richard Arcenaux, and Eadie had met him six months ago when she wandered in off the street. He called her “Ea-die,” putting the emphasis on the second syllable, in that soft, sexy New Orleans accent that made her feel like she was walking across the deck of a rolling ship.
Eadie sighed and opened her eyes. Monkey Mind had gotten the best of her. There was no use denying it. Somewhere in the house her phone was chirping again. She got up and went inside, finding it finally beneath a pillow on the library sofa. The house phone began to ring incessantly but Eadie ignored it, too, checking the voice mail on her cell. Trevor had called for a third time but he hadn't left a message, which meant he was definitely going to be delayed in New York.