82 Desire

by Smith, Julie

  “Waiting for my husband—see that big guy over there?”

  Russell glanced over his shoulder, and Dina Wolf laughed.

  “I’m kidding, I’m a graphic designer, unmarried. Talking to a cute guy, just for fun. No strings, no obligations, just talk.”

  Actually, he didn’t much care at that point who or what she was. In fact, he was extremely confused by her. He’d never met a woman in a baseball cap who talked like this. He said, “You’re damn right, Dina Wolf. I didn’t like my father much at all. I did a lot of things he wanted me to do—”

  “Trying to get his approval.”

  “You a shrink or a graphic designer? I was going to say, I didn’t like the old coot, but he gave me a lot. In a way, I guess I owe him big-time. Everything I became I owe to my father.”

  “Except,” she said, “what you are now.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  She shrugged. “Just being provocative.”

  But nothing could have been more true. He hadn’t wanted to go to Harvard, would have been perfectly happy at Tulane. Then maybe law school and an ordinary life in Uptown New Orleans. But once having gone to Harvard, he didn’t know what he wanted. He couldn’t bring himself to leave New Orleans, yet he couldn’t seem to fit in either. He worked for a bank for a while, but it was so deadly boring he finally got fired for taking too many mental health days.

  Whereupon his dad about popped a gasket. He was perfectly clear about it, too—Russell’s behavior made him look bad.

  And so Russell went to work in the oil patch. Being a roustabout suited him. He was young, he was arrogant, and after a couple of months, he looked good with his shirt off. His mom thought the sun rose and set on him, and his dad was pissed as hell. All was right with the world.

  Until an accident on the oil rig. He was covered by the company’s insurance, money wasn’t the problem. It was far more complicated than that—he lost partial use of his leg. Thus he needed someone to drive him to physical therapy, someone to help him with his exercises, someone to cook his meals, someone to shop for him, and someone to do his laundry. And he had such a person. A person temperamentally suited to all these chores, who loved him deeply and wanted more than anything else to take care of him. His mother. He moved back home for a while, which gave his father power over him. Or at least he saw it that way. Russell could hear him now: “As long as you’re my son, living under my roof, you’ll abide by my rules. When you’re well, you’ll start acting like a man and get a real job.”

  One minute you were king of the world, biceps bulging like some latter-day Stanley Kowalski’s, and the next you were a little kid, once more dependent on your mother, subject to the whims and temper tantrums of your father. Russell felt the starch go out of him. He felt vulnerable and weak. And not a little desperate.

  He read history, which made him feel small and antsy, instilled in him a yearning to be part of something bigger. He read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, which made him feel he was. For some reason, he read Two Years Before the Mast, and then all the books of Patrick O’Brian. He was desperate, suddenly, to see the world. And he realized with some excitement that he could as easily become a merchant seaman as go back to the oil patch.

  He began to plan, to look forward to his recovery.

  And then one day his father came home and said, “I pulled a few strings and managed to get you a job at United Oil.”

  Russell had spoken arrogantly: “Too bad I won’t be around to take it.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I’ve got plans, Dad. And they don’t include rotting in New Orleans.”

  “And what might they include?”

  “Lying on the beach in Bali. Playing baccarat at Monte Carlo. Checking out the pyramids.”

  “Right. They’re expecting you next week.”

  “Dad, I’m serious. I’m going to sign on as a merchant seaman.”

  His father laughed, leaving him unprepared for what happened next.

  “Do you ever plan to grow up?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  His father had stood and struck him. “Well, goddamn it, act like a man! Are you trying to break your mother’s heart?”

  Russell felt as if a dark parachute had floated from heaven and closed over his head, the silk getting into his nostrils, cutting off his air, wrapping round his throat. And yet, instead of falling unconscious, or dying, even—or taking the damn thing off—he had simply learned to live half-strangled, encased in darkness.

  He had taken the job at United. He had gone to work with a lot of dumb-ass Tulane grads who were barely over playing drinking games on Saturday night—exactly the kind of person he’d once aspired to be. But now that he was someone different, thanks to his dad, he didn’t fit into the world the same man had thrust him into. A more philosophical person might simply have seen it as one of life’s ironies, but Russell, having the relationship he did with his father, wasn’t able to bring to it a philosophical approach. He was miserable in his job and hated his father for it.

  It was Edward Favret who saved his life.

  He’d known Edward all his life, but by the time he got to United Oil, he had no interest in the man. Edward was too solidly New Orleanian, too routine, too ordinary. But Edward did have a sailboat. Sailing with Edward on weekends was what kept Russell going. He found he loved the water as much as he thought he would and considered Edward’s friendship, such as it was, entirely secondary to the sailing, which fast became his obsession. And Edward, when all was said and done, was so damn pushy about being Russell’s friend, there wasn’t much to be done about it. Russell had few fascinating friends of the sort he felt he deserved.

  Exactly who they would be wasn’t clear to him, anyway. Dukes and counts, maybe? That wasn’t it. He had liked the roughnecks he worked with, but it wasn’t really their company he craved. He liked Yankees, actually. Particularly Jews.

  But Edward Favret was who happened to be around, and he introduced Russell, in short order, to Douglas Seaberry, who had gone to Yale. Douglas, for reasons Russell couldn’t quite put his finger on, was more his type.

  He was more Eastern; a little more confident. Edward had always struck Russell as slightly obsequious—someone you couldn’t completely trust. He was so damn nice you couldn’t possibly know what he was thinking.

  And how very precisely subsequent events had borne this out. Edward had as manipulative a mind as anyone Russell had ever met—though he had surprised himself in this area, displaying quite a bit of talent of his own.

  But at first they were only sailing buddies—the three of them, and later, when Beau Cavignac joined the company, the four of them. Beau, utterly preoccupied with sports, was more or less a dolt as far as Russell was concerned. Still, he was an inoffensive dolt.

  And over the years he hadn’t met any of the fascinating people he meant to, and had come to accept these three as his friends. The whole deal was cemented when Edward introduced Russell to his cousin.

  He had resisted. “I don’t know, Edward. No offense to your family, but I think I need someone with a real name. Bebe’s just a little too adorable.”

  “Come on, she’s a lawyer—she’s not even slightly adorable. Call her Babette, if you want to. Call her Queen Elizabeth, I don’t care. Just meet her—I promised my mother.”

  He had imagined someone whose personality more or less resembled cotton candy.

  She met him at the door in jeans and a white shirt, though Edward’s wife and Douglas’s date had on fussier clothes—dressy pantsuits, with lots of jewelry and plenty of makeup. Bebe had lived her whole life in Uptown New Orleans—she had to have known they’d dress that way. He liked the fact that she’d done what she pleased, anyway. She had an honest face, he thought, or maybe an intelligent one. At any rate, she looked different from the women he’d met lately. More serious, perhaps. He liked her instantly.

  When, in the course of the evening, they found themselves talking about war and its c
onsequences, World War Two and Vietnam—not just one, but both—it occurred to him that he hadn’t had so much fun on a date since Harvard.

  Bebe had been a history major; she had opinions about things most women he met had no interest in. She also had values he liked; good politics, which for him meant more or less liberal.

  And she had ambition. She wanted a career in politics.

  Once he met Bebe, he changed. He was so awed by her, by her strength, her ambition, her fineness that he found in himself some shred of self-respect he’d forgotten.

  Despite the loathsome fact of his father’s interference, his job at United was actually a pretty good gig. In fact, there was a lot about oil to interest him, a lot about business, for that matter, to sink his teeth into.

  He married Bebe as quickly as he could arrange to and then set about building a life based around her ambitions, which he admired but didn’t have himself. He would make money; he’d be a good husband and, later, father. She would conquer the world.

  He settled into a period of contentment, both in his job and in his marriage, a contentment he never expected or even dreamed of. When he looked back on it now, it was undoubtedly the best time of his life.

  His father, of course, thoroughly disapproved of Bebe, which made her all the more attractive; the old man mistook her vitality for aggressiveness, her naturalness for a feminist statement—and feminism was something for which he hadn’t a moment.

  The first time she ran for office, they worked night and day on the campaign, and when she won, the exultance, the sweetness of hard work that paid off, a victory well deserved, was the strongest high he’d ever experienced—more vivid, even, than the birth of their daughter.

  Bebe had had a special glow, almost like a garment, that turned her gold and luminous. It was a new confidence, perhaps. He didn’t know, he was just overcome with the feeling that he hardly knew his wife and he wanted her like you might want a performer, someone you didn’t really know, but found sexy as hell on stage.

  She felt it, too. All during the victory party, she kept giving him these looks, and on the way home, leaned far enough over to put her hand on his cock and nibble his ear.

  She came out of the bathroom in something he’d never seen before, something white and possibly diaphanous (if he understood the meaning of the word). Her hair was wet and she tossed it over her shoulder with an impertinent turn of her head. “How would you like to fuck a city councilwoman?”

  He was already hard.

  Their political life had been like that for a long time—a literal turn-on; the glue that held them together. Never, never was he jealous of her—he didn’t want to be her, he just wanted to be with her; wanted, possibly, some of the fairy dust to fall on him.

  It was a sun-kissed, ever-spiraling high, fed by his own rapidly rising fortunes, which were attributable in large part to his involvement with the Skinners, a drug of another sort. The exhilaration of it was like getting out of a pool after winning a race—tingly not only with victory, but also with the sheer pleasure of using your muscles.

  And then came the sailing accident, the five days in darkness; the spiritual dissection of everything in his entire life.

  He didn’t know it when he was rescued, but Bebe was lost to him at that moment. He had become a different person in less than a week, one she didn’t recognize and didn’t know what to do with.

  In her place, he might have done what she had—tried desperately to understand him, and failing, begun collecting the illicit kisses of Ernest LaBarre or someone like him.

  He didn’t tell all of it to Dina Wolf, in fact hardly said more than that he’d once had a wife, and now he didn’t. But she acted as if she knew everything there was to know about him.

  She shook her head, slowly, as if slightly disgusted. “You are one fucked-up dude.”

  That certainly wasn’t the impression he’d meant Dean Woolverton to make. He said, “You mean fucked-up drunk or fucked-up crazy?”

  She held two fingers a quarter-inch apart. “You’re just about this far from being drunk—and I don’t know about fucked-up crazy. You seem like a very nice man. All I meant was, you seem confused.”

  He said, “Maybe you could bring me some clarity,” but he really didn’t know what he meant or why he was saying it.

  “I think I’d better get you some coffee. Look, where do you live?”

  He pointed at the sloop.

  “You live aboard?”

  He shrugged. “Bachelor’s quarters.”

  “Well, I have a car. I’ll take you somewhere and sober you up enough so you can get back to wherever you park that thing.”

  “I have coffee on board.”

  “Uh-uh.” She shook her head firmly, and he understood that she was saying she wasn’t going home with him. She took him to a place with lights so bright that just about did the trick by itself.

  Three cups of coffee later, she deemed him okay to drive a boat. Later, when he thought about it, he had no idea what they talked about while he ingested brown liquid.

  He hoped he hadn’t told her any of his secrets, and made a solemn vow never to get drunk with a strange woman again.

  About noon his phone rang, and he was sure it was a wrong number.

  But it was she—the weird babe with the baseball cap.

  “Hey, Dean—it’s Dina. You okay?”

  “Fine. Hey, thanks for taking care of me.”

  “I’m cooking tonight. You eating?”

  Well, what the hell? What else did he have to do?

  “Bring wine,” she said, and gave him an address.

  Thirteen

  SKIP HATED IT when she stepped into her own courtyard and a German shepherd as big as a pony raced toward her, barking and snarling as if she meant to steal everything in her own house and rape herself as well. It happened these days every single time she came in.

  “Napoleon, goddammit,” she said, “don’t be a chicken-shit. Bite me. Just go ahead and bite me.” She held out a forearm for him to gnaw on.

  “You’re encouraging him,” Steve said. “I thought you wanted him to stop.”

  “Maybe, deep down, I really want to be bitten.”

  “Oh, God, I better call Cindy Lou.”

  “Nah. Just give me a beer and let me cry in it.”

  He went to get the beer. After she had sat down and sipped it, Napoleon having been cowed into lying down, he said, “What’s going on?”

  “You didn’t see the paper this morning?”

  “Oh, God. Bebe and Ernest LaBarre. What an embarrassing piece of crap. I had no idea Jane Storey was like that.”

  “Well, she’s not, really. Still, she’s a reporter.”

  “Let’s not get off the subject here. Could we go back to ‘what’s going on?’ Possibly expand it to ‘what’s wrong?’ “

  “Everything. LaBarre’s family’s broken up—or damaged, anyway. I walked in this morning to find Mrs. LaBarre’s wrists slit and blood all over the sheets.”

  “My God.”

  She took a pull of her beer. “Superficial wounds. Making a statement, I guess. It impressed me—don’t know about Ernest. And Bebe’s a mess. Who needs all this crap, anyway?”

  “You think it’s somehow your fault? I mean—that remark about being bitten.”

  “No. Not exactly. But Jane really, really shouldn’t have done that.”

  “What would make her do it, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. The press these days…” She let it trail off, confident he’d know what she meant. “I mean, whose business… ?”

  He was nodding. “Yeah. Whose? What’s this stuff all about? It’s the ass-end of the Roman Empire.”

  She found she didn’t really want to talk about it anymore. “How’s the house?”

  “Great. It’s just a wonderful little house. But everybody that works on it seems to think I won’t even notice if they’re a month late and charge me twice as much as they estimated.”

  “As I may have men
tioned, this is a third-world country.”

  “I got these guys who were supposed to build a brick wall in the courtyard. They arrived with no bricks.”

  “They thought you were supplying them?”

  “Nah. They just forgot to take the measurements to the brick supplier, so they had to come back and start over.”

  “Typical,” she said, her mind wandering. She was wondering where the hell she was going to go with this damn Russell Fortier thing.

  She spent the entire next morning going through Allred’s files, bank and credit card records, and phone bills, but finding no trace of his mysterious client. Evidently there was no written record of the transaction.

  She called her buddy Eileen Moreland at the Times-Picayune for all the clips on Bebe and Russell, thinking, Talk about a dirty job. There’s probably a mountain of them.

  In fact, there was an avalanche of them, mostly having to do with Bebe’s runs for office and performance while there. For the moment, Skip put those in a separate pile, concentrating solely on Russell. And saw that there was only one story—or group of stories—that were really about him and not his wife.

  They dealt with the sailing accident Bebe had mentioned. Skip found them riveting. She’d had no idea how huge the thing had been—how Russell had survived for days and then been miraculously rescued.

  What it meant to the current case she had no idea—but she wondered for the first time if being Mr. Councilwoman had grated on him.

  She needed to speak with someone who really knew him—someone he confided in. And yet, she’d already talked to his wife, his mistress, and, so far as she knew, his three best friends.

  She had asked Bebe for his Rolodex, and she went through it idly. Neither Gene Allred nor Talba Wallis was in it, but that was no surprise. Cindy Lou wasn’t either.

  Most of the names could have come out of the phone book—none rang bells or waved red flags. Dammit, she might as well go see Bebe again.

  She phoned first; the councilwoman was in.

  Bebe was looking the worse for wear, having huge circles under eyes that looked permanently red. Skip didn’t know whether to ignore it or say something. She settled for, “How’re you holding up?”