by Brian Hodge
And now, as then, he found the tomb of the cemetery’s most celebrated resident, or perhaps most notorious: Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen of old New Orleans.
Hers was by far the most decorated, not in construction, but by the hands of prior pilgrims, covered with X’s etched with chalk, chunks of porous brick. These from souls seeking the intercession of her spirit on their behalf; legend had it that Marie could be kind, and swayed by small token gifts. Trinkets hung from corners, and from a bracket that held a half-burned stick of incense, and lay on thin ledges: coins, cheap necklaces, a pair of earrings. A line of graffiti ran near the bottom, the irreverence of some metaphysical wag: Marie lives with Elvis.
Justin found a book of matches, three left, wedged along the bottom of the tomb. He lit the remainder of the stick of incense. Wisps of sandalwood on soft winds, sweet and heavy, fragrance of mysteries.
He prayed.
Perhaps he looked the fool to the few other visitors, come for more secular reasons: Justin, leaning against the tomb with his forehead pressed to stone, a quiet whisper on his lips, prayers to a dead pagan. May he not be forced to walk this world alone, may clarity of thought and vision return to the one love he’d found with whom he could overcome his own worst obstacles. May she be restored by the same sword under which she had fallen, may the moral ambivalence of this impenetrable religion swing back in her favor. Grant this, please, holy Marie.
He wiped his nose, took a chunk of aged brick from one of the ledges, and marked his own three X’s, red and bold. He dug into his pocket for a handful of coins, let them fall to the strip of sandy earth at the base of the tomb; may she recognize this offering. He rapped his knuckles thrice upon the stone front; may she hear, and know him to be earnest.
Done.
He stepped back, breathed deeply, tipped his face to an empty sky. Eyes gummed with earlier tears, and he would have prayed for rain had he had any soul left with which to plead, or bargain.
Justin moved slowly away from the tomb, passing by some ragged vagrant in layers of clothes, and for all they acknowledged each other they might both as well have been blind.
Considerably wider berth was given to him by some couple with a camera, middle-aged, middle income, middle American. How did he look to their eyes? How haggard, how lost, how badly drowned in stagnant waters they would never swim? Such a picture he could pose for, for their friends back home, Yes, these people really do exist, here’s proof.
Go home, the priest had told him. And he supposed he would. To what, he no longer knew. At least he had one.
Before moving toward the exit of the cemetery, Justin turned for one final look at the tomb of Marie Laveau, hope’s last refuge. A parting glimpse to carry with him to meet the fervent needs yet to come.
And there he saw the vagrant, on both knees, scooping up a handful of coins.
Chapter 33
Shades of Gray
Tampa, again, where life went on and left them behind. The city had changed in their absence. Buildings threw longer shadows, traffic flowed more recklessly on pavement that had never felt so unyielding, while palm trees died of some inner blight only Justin could see — how else to explain such a drastic loss of vibrant green?
There had been no improvement in April, not that Saturday at Mama Charity’s, nor the next day, nor the next, when Justin knew he could retreat from the world no longer. He brought her home, taking the rental car, fearing her possible reaction to flight — changes in cabin pressure, takeoff, any of ten thousand little cues he took for granted that might have set her off into panic. Driving she tolerated, the backseat her world, her cradle.
That first night home he didn’t sleep at all, even when she did. The loft felt forbiddingly huge, as barren as a scraped womb.
April could sit for hours and stare at nothing. She had given up interaction with the outer world, except for the occasional moment of skewed lucidity when her eyes would focus on something that was indeed there, and he tried desperately to be that thing.
“Don’t you know who I am?” he would ask.
April’s return stare, anguished recognition and some answer on her lips that she could not allow; then slow, crushing tears.
“What do you see? Tell me.” Justin, begging. “Please tell me what you see.”
“The earth,” a half whisper, “in my sky. Bruises.”
Theme and variations, each time, then her inevitable crumble into retreat. Sometimes she would let him hold her, other times wailing as if his touch left abrasions on raw skin. After which he would do some retreating of his own, and he understood the comfort to be found in the fetal position: It turned the body into a fortress, left the mind free to spew every thought into the void. Thank you, God, thank you, Marie, thank you all for listening, for laughing, and I hope our pain is sweet enough upon your tongues.
Any scapegoat, he supposed, was better than the truth of none.
And he wondered, why not join April? Perhaps she’d found some oblivion far preferable, and suffered only when drifting back close enough to face the unfinished life left behind. Join her, yes, destroy his own mind. He certainly had brought back firepower sufficient for the task. One shot through the roof of his mouth — the scalding taste of gunpowder and a glorious shattering white light, and he would be on his way.
Something to consider.
The next day he brought in the first of several experts, April’s therapist, Dr. Carole Gurvitz … and the responsibility was irrevocably passed into the hands of others. Theories were given, tests run, and he answered questions the best he could, about what had happened that night, insofar as it related to April.
In the end, science defeated mysticism. A CAT scan showed a shadowy lesion on her right forebrain, while Justin heard far more than he cared to of words such as schizophrenia, and catatonia. They were a kind of defeat, those words, for they meant he could never help. She needed far more care than he could ever supply.
Dr. Gurvitz recommended a private institution in the suburbs of Orlando. She would not be sexually abused here, Dr. Gurvitz promised him in its parking lot, the afternoon they had left her within its walls; the staff was carefully screened to weed out potential candidates for that sort of behavior.
But no guarantees. He knew better.
It was early December and felt nothing like winter. He turned full body into a wind that scoured dust and grit along asphalt. Wind from the west, a gulf wind that would have begun cool but had an entire state from which to suck up heat by the time it got here, to sear him where he stood. Good. Good. He wanted to burn.
Survivor’s guilt. How well Moreno had known of what he spoke. Although Justin now understood what Moreno had not: One final minute to say goodbye would alleviate nothing. It respected no pain.
“She asked me to kill her,” said Justin. “Not long after she first woke up. Told me to kill her. I think I know why.”
“I would imagine April was suffering some sort of delusion at that point.” Dr. Gurvitz’s black-and-white-streaked hair was in hopeless disarray, and she gave up trying to salvage it. “Justin, she very likely didn’t know what she was saying.”
“No, no. She knew. She knew.” Justin turned to look at the hospital, and every callous slang term he’d ever spoken to refer to such a place came back to haunt. “She was a lot wiser than I was at that moment.”
He tried to tell himself that his eyes were damp and streaming because of the wind. Just the wind.
“Because she saw the future.”
It began even before her institutionalization, and continued well after: the domestic mop-up of April’s life, as it had been lived. There was no bittersweet nostalgia in this, not in the way it so often settles over the survivors of the dead as they offer sad smiles over sorted belongings, and remember moments forgotten.
It was more like sinking her life into mothballs, then placing it on a shelf in hopes she might someday reclaim it. Hence the greater pain, for he was denied a sense of closure in this wrap-up. With h
ope alive, however feeble, it clung with stubborn claws that left the wounds forever fresh and bleeding.
Leaving no choice but to seek the anesthesia of old, and he found that the bottles had been patient all along, and welcomed his return. Old friend, old friend, so lovely to have you back where you belong.
Justin returned the calls on her answering machine, and when he ran out of these, culled more names from her Rolodex. Suggesting each client find a new commercial artist; April was ill, in the hospital, would be unable to work for some time yet to come.
He ordered her desk, her easels. Tools and pencils and paints and brushes boxed up. The final month’s billings sent out because he would eventually need the money.
In a file marked LETTERHEADS he came across a paper with his name, and hers. KINGSTON-GRAY & GRAY, LTD., ADVERTISING SERVICES, this at the top, with their address, phone. This rough layout was paper-clipped to a second draft, done on computer and run off on her laser printer, with space reserved for some logo yet to come.
He stared at it until it blurred through bourbon tears, wondering when had come her change of heart. Or had she still been teetering with indecision, and why couldn’t she at least have told him this much?
Perhaps she almost had. Memory, random access: in the Gretna motel, awaiting Moreno’s return, heartfelt talk sandwiched between lovemaking. The last thing he’d ever said regarding his career crisis, and there came that moment when she had been about to say something, something, and he’d feared chastisement and steered them elsewhere with some ill-advised crack about his own death.
In retrospect hadn’t she looked like a woman about to admit to some pleasant surprise? Admit this: He would never know.
She was three days gone when he decided he could no longer keep the cat. Ajax was a reminder he could no longer tolerate. Remembering the night they had adopted Ajax, or she them, as storms pounded Florida’s Gulf side with unrelenting wind and rain. Above the fury had risen the whine of this cat, kitten really, having found its way up their stairwell.
April’s heart had melted, and she had taken it in, two pounds of cat and four of wet fur. Light gray fur that when wet deepened into a hue closer to blue than anything — just like Ajax cleanser, she’d observed.
He could find no home among friends or acquaintances, and went so far as to entertain the thought of taking her to a shelter.
In the end Ajax was taken in by April’s parents, in St. Pete, the cat given a warmer reception than he got. What fine noses they had, the Kingstons, as if they’d found it sublimely easy to sniff out the blame for the loss of their daughter. No gained son, he, to their eyes Justin was most of everything they had never wanted her to meet, much less marry. Or so he surmised. And could he blame them? They would have had ample hopes and dreams of their own, all parents did.
Grandchildren? Probably so.
So take the cat, with all due compliments.
Because it’s the closest thing you may ever get.
It was the second week in December before he ventured out to do his drinking with others, rather than the solitude of home. Former coworkers from Segal/Goldberg, out to celebrate something or other, unleashed upon an upscale watering hole.
A outsider this time: He’d taken a grim satisfaction in shooting his Segal/Goldberg career through both knees, one more bright future stalled in flameout. His fall a radiant arc visible from department to department, a cautionary tale to light the fast tracks of others.
He watched them from a table on the fringe, close enough to the bar for comfort, but distant from the dance floor and meat market crush. Slick business attire, loosened just enough for post-5:00 P.M. epicureanism: They danced, they nursed drinks with Spartan thirst, they traded business cards with new acquaintances. Like bees in a hive, with tax shelters.
“Are you sorry you came?” Nan asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“You look it.” She smiled with hope that might have been criminal had it not been so utterly sincere.
Nan Blair, the artist, had been the one to call, to coax him out, and had it been anyone else he would have found it easy to refuse. You haven’t been gone that long, you’re still one of us, she had told him, an irony he’d let slide.
He feared this. Nan had, months before, come to his rescue in a meeting gone to hell in New Orleans. And now he wondered, God help her, if she were attempting the same thing once more.
Justin pretended to study the Segal/Goldberg faces. Only three here, of the original quintet from the July meeting in New Orleans. He and Nan; Allison Hunter, who had later propositioned him on the flight home, and who now stood flanked by a couple of suited types. Leonard Greenwald missing, of course.
“Where’s Todd Whitley?” he asked.
“He changed his mind after I said you were coming.” Nan shrugged, uncaring. “He really hates you, you know that? I’ve worked with him for four years, and I’ve never seen him detest anyone so much.” She touched him lightly on the arm. “I only tell you this because I thought you’d take it as a compliment.”
“Done,” he said.
Justin stared awhile into the iced depths of his bourbon, concentrated on the numb warmth it spread in limbs and head, belly and soul. Always aware of Nan, while she stole glances at him, at times snacking on her fingernails, then catching herself and putting a conscious stop to it. He found it endearing.
Though this could get ugly later. He was grateful that someone cared about his life, but it seemed important that he not entangle it with anyone he cared for, in turn. Nan didn’t deserve his kind of craziness. Let her salvage some neo-Baudelairean poet from Ybor City’s counterculture milieu, some melancholy idealist yearning to still believe in love. That would suit her well.
“Can I tell you something for your own good?” Nan said.
“Can’t wait.”
“You look frightening. How much weight have you lost?”
“I don’t know. Even if we’d owned scales, I don’t think I’d bother climbing on.”
“Are you looking for work someplace else?”
“I don’t know.” Again, the all-purpose reply. But what had been so difficult about the question? The answer was a simple no. “I just need some time. To figure out how I want to live. Where. Why. Or really, even if I want to.” He spoke slowly, choosing words with care, observing with some detachment that each one hit Nan like a scalpel. “I guess I should find a job. Insurance, you know, that’s bound to run out before the need. I can’t stand the thought of having to move her to some state hospital.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Couple days ago. Sunday.” Smiling for a moment, through that ache for the lost, recalling April. A nurse had recently brushed her hair and it had shone like a raven’s wing. “I took her some of her paints and brushes, some canvases. They thought it was a good idea … maybe she’d purge something that way.” And maybe next time he would pluck out his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see the desperate emptiness in her own. “She’s so far beyond me. Beyond anything I can say to her. Do you know what that’s like?”
“I’m learning,” Nan said.
Oh, good one, Nan, good one. Try to hold the verbal mirror a little higher next time, I might have missed a spot. He decided to kill this line of first-aid before it went any further. Turned in time to see Allison Hunter laugh without sound and clutch the arm of one of the two suits. Tall and blonde, every Revlon stroke in place, and how disjointed it all looked when she staggered on her high heels and nearly fell. Her drink sloshed, and it looked as if one of the two suits was about to make an escape.
“In rare form, isn’t she?” said Nan.
“She wanted to fuck me, did you know that? After that meeting in July. The plane back hadn’t even landed before she made it clear.”
Nan drew back, skimmed one hand through her bangs, tried to look overly impressed. “Wow, and you didn’t even have your own office. That was a compliment.” Slumping back down again, chin on fist, very glum.
“Please tell me you didn’t do it.”
“I didn’t,” he said, and she appeared genuinely relieved, and he started to laugh. Edgy laugh that ignored his eyes, a do-you-trust-me-with-this-knife laugh. “But you’ve got to wonder if the offer’s still good. I mean … look at me now.” Laughing again, here I sit, days of beard and a shirt that’s never seen a tie, Ray-Bans hanging from a pocket to mask the bleary eyes to come. He was ready for any emergency, or a car wreck.
“Stop it,” Nan whispered, and it did make him wince inside to see the pain in her eyes. But? She wanted to help? Then let her see what she was opening herself up for. Then see how eager she would be to act as a strangled savior in the midst of desolation.
“You know what the worst part of going through something like this is?” he said. “It’s the honesty of it all. Every lie you wrapped yourself up in gets stripped away, and it’s so cold when all that’s gone. Everything you ever told yourself that meant something … gone.”
Every institution and belief system into which he’d placed faith had been casualties of awakening, and opened eyes, and above all, innocence lost.
“I don’t believe in anything anymore,” his final declaration. “The last thing I believed in was my marriage. We’d gone through so much by the time we got to that point, I thought for sure it could survive anything.” A heavy shrug. “I was wrong. That’s what you get for believing.”
Could he make Nan cry, or at least surrender? Damned if she wasn’t resilient. “You say that, but I don’t think you mean it. I know you better than that.”