Like others in the cemetery, Asmore’s tomb was raised above-ground to protect the coffin inside from being disinterred in the event of flooding. I recalled from my reading that the artist’s remains did not reside in the low, rectangular structure of brick and mortar, but to stand on the sod where his friends, teachers and admirers had once stood and grieved over his empty coffin had no small impact on me. I’d become one of them, I supposed, and suddenly I felt a closeness to the man that no amount of research had been able to provide. In the graveyard he was more real to me than he had been anywhere else, including the beauty school, the small rooms of Annie Rae Toussaint’s house and his home in the French Quarter. While locating his tomb had been significant, it was the dark poetry of the legend carved on its face that made my heart pound. I reached out a hand and felt the words with my fingertips. BELOVED ASMORE, it said.
It wasn’t until I started to walk away from the tomb that other unanticipated details registered. I turned back and leaned against the rain surveying the mausoleum again as well as others in the area. At least three of them, including those to the left and the right of Asmore’s, were inscribed with the same family name: Lowenstein. “You again,” I muttered, although I can’t say it came as a surprise.
It should have ended there. But I happened to cast my eyes downward, to the foot of Asmore’s tomb, where a single flower lay on the cement slab that formed an apron under the bricks, its petals bruised from exposure, the spray of leaves around it beaded with raindrops. It was a magnolia. On the path leading up to the tomb were parallel tracks running a few feet apart and cut into the wet sod. They might’ve been put there by a gardener’s cart. But more likely they were marks left by a wheelchair.
We drove to the studio in silence. I reached to turn on the radio but he tapped the back of my hand, stopping me. He smelled of analgesic rub, urine and other odors that I thought best not to acknowledge lest they discourage me and send me back home. As usual, his shirt was clean and stiffly starched, immaculate, while his pants were rumpled, stained and filthy. Over his clothes he wore a raincoat even though the storm was long gone. He also wore leather brogans without laces and without socks and I could see the bruises and broken blood vessels at his ankles. He was unshaven and sparse white whiskers pebbled his jaw, but at least he’d taken the trouble to comb his hair. It was good hair for an old man. I considered telling him that, but saying anything about a man’s hair felt unnatural and I couldn’t get it out. I also considered starting with the questions about Asmore, now that he was stuck in the car with me and couldn’t escape. Instead I said, “Where will you go, Mr. Lowenstein, once you find a buyer?”
He stared at me but never did answer.
It had stopped raining and now a breeze blew and tunneled down the streets. Light from the streetlamps lay in pools on the asphalt and colored the air a greenish yellow. It felt like fall was coming even though the temperature outside was probably over seventy degrees and midnight had come and gone an hour ago. I felt a loneliness I couldn’t place or make sense of. It was the loneliness, I figured, that came with the changing of the seasons, and it made me want out of my body. I wished I’d stayed at home and gone to bed. I would be sleeping now like everybody else in the world. That was how I felt: like I was the last person awake in the world, even with Lowenstein beside me and Rhys Goudeau waiting for us on Martin Luther King.
I parked and got out and from inside the car he said something. I walked around to his side and opened the door and lowered my head to hear him better. “You say something, Mr. Lowenstein?”
“Goddamned arthritis,” he said.
“No, it was something else.”
“I said that’s where I went to temple.”
“Where?”
“That building there. When I was a boy.” He looked off in the direction of an old church that now was home to an African-American congregation, Baptist probably. “I grew up in this neighborhood,” Lowenstein said. “It’s all black now but I grew up here.”
“It isn’t all black,” I said.
“No, it’s all black, trust me.”
“But I know for a fact that not all the businesses are black.”
“The businesses?” And he laughed. “What businesses? The businesses on Dryades Street? The ones on Carondelet? They all left. They left a long time ago.”
“Uglesich’s Restaurant is still here. There’s a dairy still here. The Crescent City Conservation Guild is here.”
“The what?” He grabbed the doorframe and put a foot out. “Take my word for it,” he said. “I know what I’m telling you.”
I offered a hand but he pushed me away. I stood back and watched him. What had Levette Asmore seen in the man to keep him around as a friend? Had he ever been anything but rude and condescending? What about old? Was it truly possible that he’d been young once? A look of pain aggravated his face as he extricated himself from the car and stood on the sidewalk and rose to as tall as he could make himself. “I remember when the fire department came and saved my grandmother’s house,” he said.
“The what?” I said it the same way he had said it earlier, to show that it didn’t matter, that he didn’t matter.
He was looking across the boulevard at the firehouse. “The whole back of it was in flames. They were Irish, the firemen.”
“They were Irish? How’d you know that?”
“I remember their blue eyes.”
I was still thinking poorly of him, still wondering if he might’ve been different once. “I could give a damn what they were,” I said.
He nodded as though he understood. He looked at me awhile. “It started in the kitchen,” he went on. “They stopped it before it could move to the rest of the house.”
“Why did they have to be white firemen? Irish boys?”
“They didn’t have to be,” he said. “That’s what they were.”
“Sometimes I hate the world, I swear I hate it. I hate the way God made it.”
“So do I,” he said. “But I didn’t hate it as much back then.”
We walked to the building and Rhys opened the doors and I went in first and Lowenstein followed. The two of them stood just inside looking at each other. She helped him off with his raincoat. “Can I get you something to drink?” She was talking to Lowenstein. “How about a cup of coffee? I think I have Coke, too. Would you like a Coke?”
“I’m not thirsty.”
“I’m glad you came,” she said.
“I thought it might be worth another look.”
He refused our help getting up the stairs, and for a while I thought we’d have to carry him. With each step he paused for breath and, using a badly disfigured index finger, counted the number remaining before he reached the top. “Only nine left,” he said near the halfway point.
“You’re doing great,” Rhys said.
“Eight,” he said, five minutes later when he’d made it to the next step.
He reached the landing and asked for a chair and Rhys dragged one over and he sat with his elbows on his thighs and his upper body taking in and letting out air. A film of sweat glistened on his face. Rhys gave him a glass of water and when he drank some spilled on his shirt and exposed wisps of curly white hair against the pink of his sunken chest. “I’m used to spilling on myself,” he said.
“You should never get used to that,” Rhys said.
“It’ll dry. Give it a half hour.”
She came back with a towel and patted the wet spot on his shirt. She put the glass away, then she placed a hand on his shoulder and stooped down until her face was almost even with his. “Can I help you back up to your feet, Mr. Lowenstein? Why don’t we walk the rest of the way together?”
He glanced upward, eyes rimmed red and blinking as they met the lights overhead. He looked confused, as if he’d momentarily forgotten who Rhys was or who he was himself. “Mr. Lowenstein?” Rhys said in a sweet voice.
“I want you to know how well I thought of your grandmother,” he told her. “Sh
e was a sweet, dear girl.”
Rhys moved her hand over to the back of his neck. Her face was right in front of his. “Thank you. Thank you for saying that. That means a lot to me.”
“A dear, sweet girl,” he said again.
He got up and shuffled over to the middle of the room and stood at the foot of the tables with the mural. His gaze went first to the lovers, then to the group of men shooting dice. He tapped a hand against his flank and a strange, clumsy grin came to his face. He threw his head back and seemed to laugh, but except for a kind of wheezing no sound came out. After a minute I understood that he was crying, sobbing as he choked on the air he was trying to breathe. “I’m there,” he said, pointing his crooked finger at the painting now. “I’m still there.”
“Jack thought that might be you,” Rhys said.
“What a… what an ugly boy I was.”
“You weren’t ugly.”
“I was ugly.”
“Here,” and Rhys brought the chair back over.
He sat as upright as he could, pushing with his hands against his thighs to keep from pitching forward, and fighting the thing that had taken control of him. “Oh Levette,” he said. “Oh Levette oh Levette…”
It was hard to watch and when I looked at Rhys I saw that she was fighting it, too. You would think it goes away at some age and doesn’t hurt so much anymore. That it fades from memory or is forgotten or scars over so that when you visit it again there is none of the wound left. But it doesn’t go away. As long as we’re alive it never goes away. “Mr. Lowenstein,” I said, “do you want me to take you home? It’s no problem if you want to go home.”
He didn’t answer and Rhys said, “Mr. Lowenstein?”
“No,” he said. He started to stand again and Rhys held him under an arm. “I need a softer chair. Is there a softer chair?”
“We can go in my office,” Rhys said.
Together we helped him get there. “Jack? Bring that chair here for Mr. Lowenstein, please.” She nodded at a Mission chair with back and seat cushions upholstered in leather. I pulled it over and she and I lifted against his arms as he fell backward.
She leaned down and put her arms around him and whispered in his ear, asking again if he wanted something to drink.
“Have you nothing stronger than coffee and Coke?” Lowenstein said.
“We might have something.”
“Pour me a glass and I’ll tell you about Levette.”
Rhys seemed reluctant to leave him, even for that.
TEN
It was difficult to believe, he said, but in those days the French Quarter was still a neighborhood, a real one. One didn’t find all the nastiness on Bourbon Street, the strip clubs and transvestite bars, the T-shirt and sex shops with blow-up plastic genitalia in the windows. In those days the only place that sold whips was the hardware store, and they were used for spanking animals, not people. Oh, there were bars, and plenty of them. But one found none of the perversion and seediness, out-of-towners being sick in the gutters, many of them yelling, on any day of the week, and at any hour, for women on the balconies to show their breasts. The tourists, in other words, hadn’t ruined it yet.
On Saturdays ladies dressed when they came downtown and did their shopping on Canal Street. They came with their hair done or else wearing little hats with flowers. This, he said, might border on cliché. Surely it was nothing Miss Goudeau and I hadn’t heard before, that the Quarter was once a real place, or that women actually went there wearing clothes, but he thought it worth repeating, if only to build a picture of a world entirely different from the one in which we now found ourselves. “It wasn’t all better in those days,” Lowenstein said. “God, no, it wasn’t. But I’ll get to that.”
He sipped from his glass of whiskey. His eyes were closed, I suspect as much to keep from having to look at Rhys and me as to see through his window on the past.
It was on a streetcar on Carondelet Street, he said, headed toward the Quarter on a Monday morning in August of the year that he saw him for the first time. The front of the car was crowded, but the rear, where the Negroes sat, still had seating available. Asmore was riding in front, in the middle of a crowd of passengers, busily filling in the page of a sketchbook open on his lap. Lowenstein stood in the aisle grasping a handhold overhead. Because he admired fine bones and great hair, and the general appearance of someone beautifully made, Lowenstein found that he could not keep his eyes off the young artist. Asmore’s long, slender fingers were making quick studies of unsuspecting fellow travelers, and drawing them in caricature. He was like that, always having to keep his hands busy. In fact, he smoked because he couldn’t stand to have his hands idle. It was not the nicotine he craved but rather intimacy with the cigarette itself.
“Did he chain-smoke?” Rhys asked.
“Did he chain-smoke?” Lowenstein opened his eyes. I, too, recognized the question as being odd, and hardly significant. “No,” he answered, seeing that she sincerely wanted to know. “I don’t think you could describe his smoking that way. We mostly rolled them back then. It took too much time for a busy young person to chain-smoke.”
“It’s just that I want to see him as best I can.”
“I understand,” he said.
The car stopped to load more passengers, almost all of them white, and Asmore, finding his range of motion restricted, and thus being unable to continue sketching, stood up and casually walked to the rear of the car. Nobody said anything, but several passengers turned back and stared, including blacks scattered on the benches. Asmore sat next to a dark-skinned woman—a Negress, they would’ve called her—and began drawing again, not the least mindful of what he’d done. The only other white people Lowenstein had ever seen sitting among blacks on a streetcar were a bunch of drunks in devil costumes riding home after a Mardi Gras parade.
They got off at Canal Street and Lowenstein followed him into the French Quarter. As it happened, they were both bound for the Arts and Crafts Club Building. Asmore politely held the door open, seeing Lowenstein striding up behind him. “You rode with the Negroes,” Lowenstein told him.
“Did I?” Asmore seemed either distracted or uninterested, Lowenstein couldn’t tell which. “Well, I should consider myself lucky to have survived in one piece.”
What an odd bird, Lowenstein remembered thinking. Later someone told him who he was.
They were the same age, but they never had a class together. Asmore already had established himself as a star at the school, while Lowenstein was a pretender posing as a bohemian to avoid having to fulfill his parents’ expectations and enroll at Tulane. “I told my father I wanted my independence and my own place to live,” Lowenstein said. “I was stubborn and hardheaded even then. Against my mother’s wishes he let me have the cottage on Saint Philip. It was a dump, filled with antiques my mother no longer wanted. It had two bedrooms, and this pleased me because I saw an opportunity to make beer money. Without my parents ever knowing, I posted a note on a bulletin board at school advertising a room for rent. Levette was the only one who answered it.”
Asmore showed up with a cardboard suitcase containing toiletries and clothes, a large toolbox in which he stored painting supplies and an army-issue duffel bag stuffed with painted canvases. His disastrous show at the Arts and Crafts Club gallery was now a few months behind him. A girl drove him over in an old Ford and stood around twirling her hair and trying to look mysterious. Her pose failed when she began to glare at Asmore with the kind of sexual hunger that Lowenstein heretofore had associated with men only. Soon another girl was knocking at the front door, this one an Uptown debutante whose social calendar was often reported in the papers. While the two girls argued in the kitchen, Asmore slipped outside and went for a bottle of whiskey. The girls were still arguing when he returned. Lowenstein recognized that life with his new housemate was going to be interesting.
“Besides his obvious good looks,” Rhys said, “why do you think women found him so attractive?”
“It wasn’t only women, dear girl.”
“Let me rephrase that, then. Besides how he looked, why did people find Asmore so attractive?”
“It’s a fair question, and one I’ve often wondered about myself, because if truth be told, Levette was a reluctant lover. I can tell you his reputation as a libertine is exaggerated and largely undeserved. He was many things—an alcoholic, for example; a terrible alcoholic—but he was not sexually promiscuous. Oh, he might’ve had dalliances with a few of them, but not nearly as many as the years have piled on him. He was more interested in making their picture than making love to them.”
“Yes,” Rhys said, “but what made him so desirable, Mr. Lowenstein? What made them want him?”
“Precisely what I just told you. His indifference, I do believe, combined with a shyness or humility that one finds attractive in a boy. There also was about his nature a wounded thing that every woman who met him presumed she could help him to heal. His drinking wasn’t attractive, no, but it did add to the impression that there was something deep and troubling at work beneath the surface. He had an air of being unknowable, and of having secrets. He was the sort of person people whispered about. And of course he was brilliant. Levette was truly brilliant. When I tell you there was no one like him I mean he was not how other people are—other artists, I should say. Technically he was superior to the rest of the crowd. He could paint a complicated architectural view as easily as a human face, and he understood that women liked sitting for him. Rather than show them exactly as they were, he presented them as they secretly hoped to look. He appealed to their vanity. Women may deny this, or some may, but after a woman’s made love… well, these are the moments when she believes herself to be most beautiful and alive. Levette aimed to capture that. In most cases he succeeded.”
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