Restoration

by John Ed Bradley

  I should’ve put the phone down, right then. “Is something wrong?” I said instead.

  “No one in your past life has died, if that’s what you mean. Jack, I’m calling to ask if you would meet me tomorrow at the Sazerac.”

  “Have you been drinking again, Isabel?”

  “Oh, shit. Oh, shit, Jack. Don’t you start on that, too.”

  “I was sleeping, Isabel.”

  “I keep remembering that Christmas we went there after the office party and rented the room upstairs with the view of the rooftops. God, that was nice.”

  “That was four years ago.”

  “I loved that night. When I die I want to be remembering that night.”

  “To be honest, I’d rather forget it. I’m not proud of any part of the memory. It was a stupid thing we did and I regret it.”

  “No more sex for Jack with Jack’s married boss. Is that what you’re saying? Jack has changed. Jack has grown.”

  “I like to think I have.”

  “Jack has become a good man.” She laughed in the loud, obnoxious way I probably deserved. “You were good, too, then, Jack. You were very good. God, boy, you went at it like a jackhammer. Jack the jackhammer.”

  “Why did I have to answer the phone? Isabel, please don’t call here again. And if you insist on calling, at least show me the courtesy of doing so at a decent hour.”

  “Please, Jack. Just meet me in the goddamn bar, will you?” I didn’t answer and she said, “Freddie left me, baby. The little bastard… he left me. Do you know the woman they brought in to help edit the section? She’s fourteen years older than he is.”

  I sat up in bed and turned on the lamp. It was hopeless: there would be no more sleep for me tonight. I wondered if she could hear my teeth grinding together. “Freddie and the new editor,” I muttered. “Tell me, Isabel: what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “Help me. You’re supposed to help me. You’re supposed to help me because you’re supposed to be my friend.” And now she was crying, bawling into the phone.

  “I am your friend,” I said. “But I wonder if you’re my friend, Isabel.”

  “Then meet me there, Jack. Be my friend and meet me there.”

  “By tomorrow,” I said, “do you mean later today or do you mean tomorrow, as in Saturday?”

  “I mean like in fifteen hours from now, so tonight. I guess I mean tonight. By the way,” she continued, “to answer your question—you want to know what I’m wearing, Jack? I’m not wearing anything.”

  “I’ll see you later, Isabel.”

  “You’ll be there? Oh, thank you, sweet Jack.”

  “One drink,” I said. “That’s it.”

  After she hung up I lay in bed looking at the ceiling and trying to calm myself. My stomach hurt. Why hadn’t I just told her to go to hell and slammed the phone down? Why couldn’t it have been Rhys calling with an invitation to meet her at a hotel bar? I got up and put on some clothes and walked out to the gate. A light shone in one of the windows and I brought my face against a pane of wavy glass and looked in and saw Lowenstein asleep in his chair, a single gooseneck floor lamp burning at his shoulder. His mouth had fallen open. At his feet were piles of books such as those I’d come to favor and on top of one of the piles was a bottle. Would that be me in fifty years? I wondered. All alone with my art tomes and my booze and my stuffy fat chair? I was tempted to rap on the glass and ask him if he’d ever done dumb, regrettable things when he was young, but he looked too peaceful to disturb. His face lacked its usual grip of pain and anger and I saw in it the man he might’ve been once. No, that won’t be you, I said to myself. No way will that be you.

  I left the bayou and Moss Street and went for a drive. I cruised the French Quarter where the neon had gone dark on Bourbon Street and yet tourists continued to roam. I passed under the oaks of Saint Charles Avenue and followed the path of the Mississippi until I was at Riverbend. I had breakfast at the Camellia Grill and when I left it was still dark, the streetlamps abuzz under the palm trees.

  My mother’s house was only a couple of blocks away, and I drove there and parked across the street and waited for about an hour until she came out for the paper. Somehow seeing her in a robe and padded slippers, and reaching down for the sack in the grass as she had each morning for as long as I could remember, gave me the lift I needed. She was the good, pure thing that made the bad, corrupted ones tolerable. But I wasn’t entirely comfortable spying on her this way; I felt as if I were cheating her out of something. She paused at the door and looked back at the street. Her eyes seemed to drift to my car parked in front of the Berteaus’. I thought she’d spotted me, but then she turned and went back in the house, into rooms with empty squares and rectangles on the walls. I started the engine and shifted to Drive, and suddenly there Mom was standing at the door again. She walked to my side of the car and I let the window down. She bent forward at the waist, holding the robe together at her chest, and peered inside. “Everything okay, Jack?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Would you like to come in and join your mother for coffee and the paper?”

  I shook my head. “I was just out driving and ended up here.”

  “It’s your home, Jack. You can always come here. No matter what.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Will you bring your friend over sometime, Jack?”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  “If she’s anything like her name, she must be really beautiful.”

  “Rhys is black, Mom.”

  “Yes, I know, sugar.” She reached in the car and put her hand on my face. “You just bring her whatever color she is.”

  I waited until she’d gone back in the house before I left, and before I let the tears start to fall. I hadn’t cried when my dad died, nor had I cried since, but I really made up for it now. I cried so hard I thought I was going to hurt myself. My whole body was involved. I had to pull over on the side of the road.

  When I finished, I drove to Martin Luther King and the old fire-house that was home to the Guild. By now it was almost six o’clock in the morning, way too early to be feeling so much. Central City was coming awake in the spinning gray light. Pigeons fed in the street; a woman in raggedy clothes pushed a shopping cart holding a collection of cans and other found objects. I don’t know why I was surprised, finding the studio lights on upstairs. At some other time I might’ve sat on the horn and forced Rhys to come outside and talk to me. But this morning I was content to wait. A couple of hours went by before I caught a glimpse of a shadow moving across one of the windows, and then in an instant Rhys was standing there, staring out at me. She wore a lab coat and her hair was pulled back in a loose arrangement. I stepped out of the car and stood in the street and waved up at the building. She lifted the window and thrust her head out. “He used casein paint,” she called out.

  “He did what?”

  “Levette. He used casein paint. He covered the surface with casein paint. To protect it. He saved the painting, Jack.”

  “That’s great,” I yelled up at her.

  She wrapped her arms around her chest and hugged herself.

  I started to ask if I could come up for a look, and then I thought it might be the right time to tell her that I was in love with her. But suddenly the window came down and Rhys disappeared back into the studio.

  Isabel stood as I approached the table, and tugged at the body of a blazer that had never fit her properly. There were tears in her eyes, a tremble at the flesh beneath her chin. “Don’t say anything,” she began. “Obviously I’m going through a bad time.”

  “Did I say anything?”

  We sat in chairs directly across from each other and she immediately began to drum her teeth with her nails. I reached out a hand and stopped her. “Don’t do that,” I said. “And don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “I’m fat,” she said. “I’ve put on fifteen pounds in the last six months.”

  “I think you look great.”

  �
��We really miss you, Jack. We really do.”

  “I miss you, too. But that doesn’t matter for anything.”

  She looked at me for a long while. She started to drum her teeth again but then stopped herself. “I’ve decided to start Sugar Busters tomorrow,” she said. “That’s the diet where you cut out carbohydrates and eat only protein?”

  “I’ve heard about it.”

  “Steaks and chicken and fish are fine. Peanut butter’s fine. No bread, though. And no pasta. Bread and pasta turn to sugar in the body, and sugar’s poison, it’s absolute poison. That’s why they call it Sugar Busters.”

  “You bust the sugar?”

  “That’s it, yes.”

  To the wall on my right, curving with the rounded corner, was one of four Paul Ninas murals in the lounge. It was a typical, Depressionera scene celebrating the American everyman. This one showed black laborers working a dock on the Mississippi River waterfront. Like the other paintings in the room, decades of exposure to cigar and cigarette smoke had yellowed the surface and softened the palette. I might’ve mentioned the mural, and Levette Asmore’s connection to Ninas, had doing so not raised the possibility of intruding on any one of the many confidentiality agreements I had with Rhys. Instead I feigned interest in the wine list wedged between a basket of sugar packets and the salt and pepper shakers.

  “How many times did we actually make love?” Isabel said.

  “A couple, I think.”

  “It was more than that.”

  “It was a mistake no matter how many times it was.”

  “Why didn’t it last, Jack?”

  “You were married. And you said you still loved Freddie.”

  The server brought a basket of breadsticks and took our order: for Isabel a glass of Merlot, for myself a Scotch. As soon as the woman left, Isabel selected one of the sticks, snapped it in half and generously lathered an end with butter. Her mouth was full when she said, “The last time I saw Freddie he said I was a dead lay.”

  “Freddie says a lot of things, Isabel.”

  “Was I dead with you, too?”

  “You were wonderful with me.”

  “Why would he tell me that, Jack?”

  “Freddie’s full of baloney.”

  “I might drink too much but there are still some things I won’t do, not for any man.” She bit off another piece of bread and leaned forward to make sure she had my attention. “I should write a book about the whole Barnett clan, or at least threaten to write one. It’s terrible to admit but I don’t think I’m above blackmail.” She made a pistol of her hand and pretended to be sticking me up. “‘Give me ten grand a month for life or I tell all your rich, fancy friends what kind of weird sex Freddie likes.’ Yep, that might work with old Fred. Anything to avoid displeasing Big Rodg.” She meant Freddie’s father—the paper’s publisher, Rodger Barnett. She placed her bread in a dish and reached over and ran a hand through my hair. “Handsome Jack. How are you, my darling? How are you really?”

  “I’m well, thank you, Isabel.”

  “You look well,” she said. “You look wonderful, in fact. Healthy, even. What have you been doing with yourself? Working out? Eating your veggies, for heaven’s sake?”

  “I keep busy. I’ve fallen in with a new group of friends…. Well, actually with one friend, a woman named Rhys Goudeau. She repairs damaged art objects—paintings, mostly. Ever hear of the Crescent City Conservation Guild?”

  Isabel cocked an eyebrow and finished off the breadstick. “She’s the new girlfriend, isn’t she?”

  “I told you I don’t have a new girlfriend.”

  “Good. Because I’ve heard enough about this Rhys Goudeau for one lifetime. I edited the takeout David Charles wrote about the old painting they found in that haunted house on Ursulines. Beloved Emily. Is that what it was called?”

  “Beloved Dorothy.”

  “Yes, that’s the one. David came back from reporting the story and this Rhys Goudeau was all he could talk about. And David’s gay, for God’s sake.”

  Our server arrived with the drinks. As she was setting them on the table Isabel said, “Speaking of discoveries, Jack, David made a damned-sure interesting one when he was out foraging for his feature about Levette Asmore.”

  “Did he really? And what was that?”

  “First a little back story, to set it up. I made a slip of the tongue earlier, when I referred to the haunted-house painting as Beloved Emily. In actual fact there was a Beloved Emily. But for years it hung in a house at Audubon Place. It was a portrait of Freddie’s grandmother, Emily Weeks Barnett.”

  “Okay.”

  “Asmore gave her the treatment. She was an eighteen-year-old debutante studying at Newcomb College and running with the bohemians of the French Quarter, when she met the artist and sat for the portrait. They were lovers for a time, or they were alleged to be, anyway. Rodger as a rule avoided advertising the fact that his mother was a randy little tart before she married his father, but pump a few drinks in him and he would stand on the baby grand crowing about how Dear Old Mom used to get it on with the great Levette. Emily died years ago, before I ever entered the scene, and the painting didn’t survive either. It was lost in a fire that took out the kitchen and a back section of the house. I have seen pictures of the painting, though. Photographs. And it’s just like all the others. When the news of Dorothy broke, Big Rodg naturally became interested. In editorial meetings it was all he could talk about, and he had David check around to see if any of Asmore’s relatives were still alive. He came from a town near Opelousas—”

  “Melville.”

  “What was that?”

  “Melville. Asmore came from a town closer to Melville.”

  She nodded. “Yes. You’re right. It was Melville.”

  “Asmore was orphaned as a child and sent to a home here in New Orleans.”

  “Yes, that’s what David said. But Asmore first was placed with a relative, an uncle, as I understood it. Well, David decides to find out if this person, this uncle, or any other relatives are still around and so he drives out to Saint Landry Parish and starts asking people on the streets. ‘No,’ everyone says, ‘never heard of anyone named Asmore.’ David’s about to give up when he thinks to check with the clerk of court’s office, so he drives over to the courthouse in Opelousas. They pull up records showing that an Asmore has indeed owned property in the parish. And upon his death this man’s only child, a daughter, had inherited the land, and she’d married and taken her husband’s name. Anyway, according to the records the lady is still paying taxes on the property, so she’s still alive, right? Still in Palmetto. Don’t you just love that name, Jack? Palmetto?”

  “It’s a kind of plant, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a kind of palm with leaves shaped like a fan. Palmetto covered the stones and the dirt of the roads that Jesus walked on his way to Gethsemane.”

  “That might be more detail than I need at the moment. Why don’t you finish?”

  “Well, David gets directions and heads out to the old Asmore homestead for a visit. At long last he comes to this little house up on pilings with a chinaberry tree in front and chickens rooting around in the yard. David said it wasn’t a place you’d even notice when you drove by, because it was like so many other houses out there where poor and hardworking people live. A wood fence surrounds the lot, and he goes through the gate and walks up a dirt path to the front door. He knocks and steps back and waits and nobody answers. And so he knocks again. Still no one. He’s about to give up when he decides to walk out around back and there he finds an old woman sitting under a tree fanning herself and drinking a glass of Kool-Aid. He says, ‘Ma’am, I’m looking for Annie Mae Asmore,’ I think that’s what he said her maiden name was. The woman puts her glass down and says, ‘You with a collection agency?’ He says, ‘Does she owe somebody money?’ And she answers, ‘I don’t owe nobody nothing but love and tenderness.’” Isabel twirled the stem of her wineglass and started to laugh. “Isn’t that bea
utiful, Jack? All she owes anybody is love and tenderness.”

  “It’s good. Go on.”

  “Well, David’s stunned and for a minute he can’t say anything.”

  “Why is David stunned?”

  Isabel held up a hand. “He’s stunned because she’s nothing like he was expecting to find.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Are you going to let me tell my story?” She sipped her wine and reached for another breadstick before deciding against it. “So David’s standing there in this old woman’s backyard. He’s confused by what he’s found, and he says, ‘Ma’am, are you really Annie Mae Asmore?’ She looks at him and must decide that he’s not there to take her money, and she says, ‘I used to be, before I got married to that no-account Milo Toussaint.’ He says, ‘Ma’am, are you the daughter of So-and-so and So-and-so Asmore?’ ‘Yes, I was their little girl,’ she says. David says, ‘Was the artist Levette Asmore related to you?’ ‘Levette? Levette was my first cousin,’ she answers. ‘His daddy was my daddy’s half brother. His folks, both of them, drowned in the flood of 1927 when the levee broke in Melville.’ David puts his reading glasses on and walks up closer to get a better look at the woman. ‘Ma’am,’ he says, careful to be polite, ‘ma’am, was Levette Asmore black?’ The lady looks David in the eye and says, ‘Yes, Levette was black, all the way until he died.’”

  Now Isabel tapped my arm with one of the breadsticks. “Jack, what is wrong with you all of a sudden? Was someone in your family a Beloved girl, too?”

  “Nothing like that,” I said.

  “Then take it easy, will you?”

  The Scotch had burned my throat, and I coughed into a fist. My eyes were watering and I felt cold all over. “Why didn’t David write it?” I said, and coughed again. “How could the paper sit on a story as important as that one?”

  “What? Are you kidding me? Levette Asmore was a Negro, Jack, passing as a white. Good God, imagine the scandal if that piece of news hit the streets. Do you think Rodger Barnett would allow such a thing to be printed in his paper—that as a teenage girl his mother, future matriarch of one of the city’s most prominent families, was screwing a black man? Now, Freddie’s been with black women—he’s claimed to, anyway—but that’s different. While it might be cool to picture Freddie with sassy colored chicks, it ain’t cool imagining a black man putting the wood to Miss Emily.”