by Haven Kimmel
“Only a fool doesn’t know what she likes.”
He nodded. “What’s your favorite piece up here?”
She walked back down the hallway a few feet. “This one,” she said, pointing to a portrait of a little dark-haired girl sitting in bed, her eyes round and grave. The wall behind her was painted with a lavish floral scene but was heading toward ruin. The print was small, five thousand dollars.
“Oh, I love that one. Roman Vishniac, the only one I’ve ever had. I’ve been here thirty years, and that’s it. So I treasure it myself.”
The Only Flower of Her Youth, Warsaw, 1938.
“It hardly bears thinking about,” he said, shaking his head, “what happened to her. If you like this, I have a couple books of his downstairs. Let me show them to you. I’m Jacob, by the way.”
“Cassie.” She shook his hand and followed him down the narrow staircase. Downstairs he greeted other visitors, then took a coffee-table edition of Vishniac’s photographs off the shelf. On the cover were two little girls caught in some game, gleeful and conspiratorial. Children of a Vanished World. He handed the book to an assistant and asked her to wrap it.
“This is on me,” he said, handing the package to her. “And take this, too.” On the back of a business card he wrote the name and address of a restaurant. “This is where you should have dinner. Tell the goofy guy at the door that I sent you.”
“Thank you.” Cassie looked at the card, Epistrophes on Royale.
“My pleasure.” Jacob gave her a slight bow. “Enjoy our fay-uh city.”
Epistrophes’s owner, Gabe, who looked and sounded like a Brooklyn detective (born and raised in Baton Rouge), took Cassie over the minute she introduced herself. He brought her a bottle of white burgundy, then ordered from the menu for her: fried green tomatoes over fresh mozzarella with a basil aioli, a nearly raw tuna steak with sautéed greens. He explained how the steak had been seared in olive oil suffused with the oils of exotic peppers.
“Is it too spicy?” he asked, sitting down opposite her. “Do you need more bread?”
“It’s perfect. I never—I’ve never eaten this well.”
For dessert he brought a goat-cheese crème fraîche with poached pears and a mint leaf, a cup of strong coffee, asked if she’d like a liqueur. She told him she needed to keep her head clear; she was about to visit a landmark in her mother’s life, and she was looking for a pool hall.
“Landmarks we’ve got plenty of; pool halls are scarce. There are a few places in the Quarter with tavern tables, but nowhere around here with nine-footers. I don’t know what’s happened. It’s fallen out of favor.”
She said she was looking for a game, mentioned Jackson LaFollette. He told her about a private room in an old hotel, then sized her up, too late to take it back.
“Not the nicest people in the world.”
“No,” she said, “I wouldn’t think so.”
Gabe stood up, stretched his lower back. “Gettin’ too old for this business.” They shook hands, and he told her the meal was on him. “Any friend of Jacob’s,” he said, walking back toward the bar. She left him a fifty-dollar tip, just a portion of the cost of the meal, then stepped out into the night. Perhaps New Orleans was a real place, or maybe she’d gotten lucky and stepped into the world Laura had conjured, standing in her kitchen in Roseville, in exile. Thirty-three years’ worth of longing redeemed was what this city felt like to Cassie.
* * *
She stood outside the Grille on Bourbon Street, studying the facade. Some people were lucky enough to live in Los Angeles and to have their own genesis paved over flat and simple. Others grew up in the shadow of their making (my father was born here and my mother next door); they went to church together every Sunday and married there (I was conceived and born, too, in this bed my parents still sleep in), and that would have been a terror to Cassie. To Belle. Nothing said run like the fact of her origin: Laura and Jimmy innocent of each other, then innocent no longer, hell-bent on ruination and their children the evidence they succeeded.
The Grille was a diner as diners should be, shaped like a caboose, a glass door framed in metal, draped inside with twinkle lights. She opened the door and stepped in; the counter stretched the length of the long building, with booths in the front window. On the jukebox Peggy Lee was singing “Is That All There Is?” and at the counter a transsexual was smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. Her paisley dress, silk and clinging like water,was buttoned up wrong in the back, and she had cut her ankle shaving. A young girl stepped out of the kitchen in an apron and a hair net, and this was what Cassie wanted to see, a girl working. Someone the age Laura had been. Even the transsexual seemed to have been placed as a prop, since Laura had mentioned a friend called Beverly who came in every night after eleven and eventually was abducted and left for dead in a bayou. Laura missed her for years, and now here she sat, after a fashion.
To replay the scene entirely, the diner would have to be empty save for Laura, working the night shift, nineteen years old, betrothed to a man of means and questionable character named Jackson LaFollette. The bell over the diner door, currently missing, would ring, and in would stroll Jimmy Claiborne, beaten and bleeding but on his feet. Laura said his injuries hadn’t seemed life-threatening, and she didn’t much care anyway.
Cassie sat down a couple stools away from Beverly and closed her eyes. She could imagine him, short and lithe, that spring in his step. He wore, Laura had told her so many times, cream-colored linen pants, pleated and cuffed with a strong break, two-tone shoes, a braided brown leather belt, and a white silk shirt under a cashmere sweater vest. Dance, dance, his feet were always moving, he slid and tapped, jingled the change in his pocket in time. He could whistle the entire repertoire of a mockingbird he kept as a boy: twenty-three songs. And snatches of classical music, isolated for a dramatic rise or fall, a trill. He could sing, do imitations of Bing Crosby or Elvis, but never sang seriously. For a while he’d played a snare drum in a band at a home for Wayward Men, but he gave it up, and Cassie had never heard him play. Legend had it he could cook; he could swim a mile, but she’d never seen that, either. Because he wasn’t the sort of man, he might have said, who would take up practicing something just because he could, simply because he’d been given a healthy measure of God’s gifts, he wasn’t responsible for what God had taken it upon Himself to hand out. What he liked to do was gamble. He was wired for a certain sort of risk.
“What can I get ya?”
Cassie opened her eyes to the young waitress, her acne and cheap metal necklace. One of her teeth was slick with the coral of her lipstick.
“Just coffee, black.”
“And another for me, doll,” Beverly said, raising her cup.
Jimmy sat down at the counter. He was bleeding over his left eyebrow and from his bottom lip. His right eye was starting to swell. A handkerchief, formerly buttercream, was stained with the blood he was trying to keep off his shirt. When Laura approached him, she smelled his cologne, something spicy and masculine, maybe bay rum, and the Sen-Sen he always carried in his pocket, a man who applied Chap Stick every day and was shaved so close his skin was like a boy’s. Cassie remembered his smell; she had spent hours as a child categorizing it. It is like this—no, it’s more like this. Finally she had landed on oranges and whiskey, that was his essence and everything else was extra. He smoked, of course, and wore a tiny bit of Brylcreem in his hair. I’ve got places to go and people to do, he said at the door as he headed out into the night, and left his silent wife reading in the dim living room. Those smells came home with him, too.
“Can I get a chocolate milk shake?” he’d asked Laura, giving her his haven’t-I-gotten-myself-into-some-predicament smile. She didn’t smile back.
“With whipped cream?”
“There are milk shakes without whipped cream?”
Laura stepped over to the ice-cream freezer—the metal cup would go from warm to frosty in her hand, a swift conduit—and noted, as people do, that the
jukebox was playing Louis Armstrong, “St. James Infirmary.” The man behind her began to whistle along with the song, but she didn’t look at him. She shoved the mixture up under the spinning blade harder than she needed, blocking out the sound. When the blender stopped, he was humming, a sound both scratchy and deep.
The waitress poured coffee for Cassie and Beverly, then went back to wrapping silverware in napkins. The coffee was steaming and smelled vaguely like chocolate.
“This town is full of sonsabitches,” Beverly said, perhaps to no one. She shook her head in resignation.
Cassie blew on the surface of the coffee. Laura set the milk shake in front of Jimmy, along with a tall spoon and a straw, and he smiled at her gratefully, then fainted. People fainted in the Grille all the time, or they threw up, burst into sobs, inconsolable. They fought, they fought off delirium tremens, they had heart attacks, seizures, they confessed. It was a busy place. But the rule was that the unconscious couldn’t stay. Laura’s boss, Badrae, wasn’t running a boardinghouse, as he liked to say. So Laura went around the counter and hoisted Jimmy up from where he’d slumped over the neighboring stools, took him under the arms. He didn’t weigh much, he was a small man with a light step. She dragged him out onto the sidewalk, where he opened his eyes, an even more striking blue-green in the streetlight than in the day, and said, “I don’t have any money to pay you for that milk shake.”
“Do you know what I mean about sonsabitches?” Beverly asked, looking at Cassie.
“I think I do.”
“Mine just kicked my ass out his apahment. Don’t have my clothes, my purse, nothin’. Says he’ll be ’round this way to pick me up in the mahnin’. Mmm, mmm, mmm. I think he caught a whiff uh his wife. She in town, I think.”
The coffee was rich. Not chocolate. Something else. “That’s no good,” Cassie said.
“Naw it ain’t! I say to him, Look how you do me! I cry like a chald and say, Look! But nothin’ gets through that man. Didn’t even have my dinnah, he kickin’ my ass out.”
Laura had thought little of it; the way of the world was the con. But the next night Jimmy had shown up again, what a dresser! How sweet he smelled! And paid her for the milk shake and ordered one of the Grille’s famous hamburgers (without condiments: he was a finicky man) and tipped her 300 percent. That was all the story Cassie had ever known, that and Laura taking up and following Jimmy to Indiana not two weeks later, leaving behind her own mother, everything she’d ever known. Wild love, oxygen-depriving passion. Cassie was the daughter of a great romance, if what was meant by romance was wreckage. The story was not diminished by the other cogent details: that Laura had been engaged to another, or that when she finally found Jimmy in Indiana, he was back in his trailer on a wooded lot outside Roseville with his own betrothed.
Cassie finished her coffee, then walked over to look at the jukebox. Beverly remained slumped over her coffee cup; her ass must have been kicked out along with cigarettes and a lighter, because there was a full pack of Kools on the counter, and a disposable Bic bearing the words MARDI GRAS 1998. On the jukebox there was Louis Armstrong; Elvis singing “That’s All Right, Mama,” and Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Dorsey, Julie London, Harry James, Howlin’ Wolf, John Coltrane, all on CD now. Cassie looked around at the walls covered with festival paraphernalia, and photographs of strangers dancing with strangers, the green vinyl on the metal stools, the old-fashioned straw dispensers. Whoever owned this place, now that Badrae was surely on the bayou, fishing out his final days, had turned it into a dreamland for nostalgics. People like Cassie, who wanted a glimmer of the long-gone world and would accept these tokens. CDs instead of records, but the songs she wanted to hear: if that didn’t sum up the struggle. She felt very little standing in this place, far less than she’d expected.
Cassie slipped a twenty out of her wallet and laid it on the counter next to Beverly’s lighter.
“Thank you, baby,” Beverly said.
In Jackson Square, before midnight, only a few artists and tarotcard readers still sat at their makeshift booths, some drinking cocktails. They spoke to one another as if they shared a long history. Cassie approached one of the park benches, where a boy with blond dreadlocks and a beard the color of honey sat hunched forward with his shirt pulled up over his head, exposing his back. He looked out through the neck of his shirt as if into an aquarium filled with starving sharks. Cassie looped around behind him. His thin back was covered with scars; if he’d been older, she would have guessed shrapnel. Another sort of war, perhaps, other weapons. Every few minutes he shivered so hard he shook the bench. A black man clutching a brown paper bag noticed the boy and walked across the square and knelt in front of him, offering whatever was in the bag, but the boy couldn’t see him.
“Bad, very bad.” The man shook his head, then sat down on the bench. After a few seconds he reached up and pulled the boy’s T-shirt down over his back, smoothed it flat.
Cassie turned the corner and stopped in front of Saint Louis Cathedral. A sign out front declared that the bishop would say the Easter mass, two days hence. The building was beautiful and imposing but didn’t suggest the inhuman power of the cathedrals of Europe, at least as they looked in pictures. Laura had wanted to see them, Belle, too, but Cassie felt her skin prickle with resentment anytime she thought about standing in front of such an edifice, or listening to a bird caught in a spire that a hundred poor men had died to build.
“Read your palm?”
Cassie turned and saw a man standing behind her, smiling in the moonlight. He was short and overweight; his glasses rested on the tops of his cheeks. He wore a long-sleeved red T-shirt with baggy shorts, and sandals with thick wool socks.
“How much?”
He was already walking toward the canvas chair sitting in the middle of the walk in front of the cathedral. “How much do you have?”
Cassie reached in her pocket and pulled out a bill. “Ten bucks.”
“Okay,” he said with a shrug. “Come sit down. Give me your right palm.”
She sat down and held out her hand.
“My name is Alan, by the way.” He held her hand only a few seconds, tracing her lifeline with his thumb, then let go. She expected him to say, You will have a long and happy life.
“You are healthy, active, you live strongly inside your body.”
“Where do other people live?”
“Oh, they’re all over the place. Most live in the past. To dwell in the body is to be fully in the present moment, but that can be a grievous thing, and a lot of work.” Alan crossed his hands over his round stomach and looked up at the sky above the church; his chin was soft, and Cassie could easily imagine him as a little boy. “You … in terms of style, you pride yourself on being free of … the chains of femininity, do you understand that? You pride yourself on not being bound to a single presentation, but that is a matter of willful naïveté. You need to think more about how absence and denial are statements as surely as anything else.” He stopped and stared with great concentration at what looked to Cassie to be the wisps of clouds passing in front of the moon, silent so long she almost concluded the reading was over. “You live in … Pennsylvania, off the Pennsylvania turnpike, no, Ohio. Someplace … I can see flatness, desolation. Ohio? Ugh, I’m sorry, but that’s just so ugly. You live in a world where the spirits have completely flown, there are no voices left, and that causes everyone around you to act out against the … well, it’s really painful, isn’t it.” He stared at the sky. “Even here the voices are weakened, it’s nothing like it used to be, we all used to feel like radio receivers, voices coming through all the time. We’d spin the dial and listen to our favorite songs. But now it’s like they’re far away, children calling from a great distance.” Alan looked at the sky, not at Cassie; she felt her eyes fill, unaccountably, with tears. She blinked them away.
“How do you gain power? This is a question I always want answered, I mean, this is something I look for. You are competitive, particularly with men, and this is
in conflict with your feelings of loyalty and protectiveness. You are in search of your better nature, but this competitiveness stands in your way, and you don’t know how to get around it. I can see … a sort of geometry, a Ferris wheel, ah, ah, you’re a gambler.” His gaze moved back and forth over the roofline of the church as if reading something there. “You measure your life in wins, but you should be counting your losses. The spirits want me to remind you that chance is the equivalent of death.”
“I don’t play a game of chance.”
He ignored her, turning his head slightly, straining to hear another conversation. “You want to travel, but not very far. Authority, hierarchy, the notion of a superior are all so anathema to you, it’s a wonder you’re able to function at all. You should avoid run-ins with the police. People talk to you a great deal, even strangers, and the reason is that you appear to stand exactly in between, on the fulcrum of happiness and despair, and this registers to the outside world as a tabula rasa on which they might scribble their own names. You consider your life a secret, and living in a secret is like living in a prison or a drafty old house.
“These spirits, the ones still left, are German, which is a surprise to everyone, all the yuppies and frat boys want to hear is that they should drink more, consume, consume, and they want to hear it in a French accent, but the spirits keep quoting Rilke.
“To you is left (unspeakably confused)
your life, gigantic, ripening, full of fears,
so that it, now hemmed in, now grasping all,
is changed in you by turns to stone and stars.
“They asked me to say that to you, I don’t know what it’s called. You are an orphaned child, this is very clear, but most of us are, and our only hope is to recognize it and cling to one another as best we can, or else harden our hearts to our own orphanhood, which is pointless. There is a world beyond this world.” Alan looked at Cassie for the first time since the reading began. “You make me sadder than anyone I’ve seen all week.”