Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  Patterson is busying himself unpacking his clothes and putting them in the mahogany dresser. “Won’t you miss your guitar?” she asks Patterson, realizing suddenly that he must feel unsettled without it. He looks a little sad, and says he’ll buy another one when he has more money. He doesn’t offer to split the money with her, although he does pay for anything and everything she wants. She thinks of bringing up the inequity but decides not to say anything since, after all, it was his bass they used.

  Other scams follow, crafted while lying in hotel room beds, lying face-to-face, or while hiking through the green humidity or while drinking Fernet or absinthe at upscale bars. The liqueurs leave Leda dehydrated and dizzy. The scams prove to be the inverse of his other trick. Persuasion requires almost as much observation as divination since the things that convince people to trust you are bound up with who they’ve been, what they’ve seen, where they want to be.

  Patterson says this trick is new to him, too. Just think, if they make enough money with these tricks, they will be able to travel abroad.

  ***

  Everything changes in Mobile, three weeks and five days after they first meet. They are visiting Patterson’s redheaded aunt, his mother’s youngest sister. She lives with her son and his family in a planned community where occasionally an alligator comes up from the creeks and attacks a toddler. The son’s wife cooks a Southern feast on the night they arrive—fried okra, grits, fried chicken, a ham, and pie. After putting her grandchild to bed with Gillian Welch’s lilting I’ll Fly Away, the aunt notices Leda’s sweater and asks what designer it is. Leda shrugs and says it’s second-hand, but the aunt’s eyes are glinting.

  The aunt smokes pot on a front porch lit with fireflies and Patterson joins her in a folding chair. The aunt asks Leda, “You ever tried chewing tobacco?” Leda shakes her head no. “Next time y’all visit, we’ll get you some.” The aunt notes briefly that Indian girls like Leda are quiet, and she teases Leda about never having eaten potted meat. “Spam’s a delicacy,” she says. Leda likes the aunt. She is mesmerized by the cold blinking lights, the croaking of the frogs, and the rattling thrum of the cicadas. The aunt explains that they emerge from their subterranean burrows every thirteen years. “We know lean times are on their way when we hear them rumbling up through the earth,” she says. The screen door creaks slowly open and then slams shut. Patterson has gone inside.

  After a few minutes, the aunt starts talking about her childhood. She tells a story about her crazy father, Patterson’s grandfather, and how he had once chased his four children through the graveyard with a rifle at midnight. “Annie pulled me behind a headstone and we hid there all night.” Annie is Patterson’s mother. Leda’s parents have dramatic tales too—about village life in Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state in India, about unrequited love and tigers attacking babies and corrupt police—but they would never share them with a random stranger.

  The aunt’s generosity is warming. Leda hugs her before turning in for the night, and she feels herself dissolving into the aunt’s tough bony shoulders, melting into the smell of marijuana and spring lilac perfume. When she pulls away, she has left something behind—all that had been orderly about her has sunk into the woman’s shoulders, never to reemerge.

  The next morning, the aunt and her daughter-in-law take them on a tour of the grand antebellum mansions of Mobile—white Greek Revival homes with plain pillars and white porch rails. Leda is covered in angry red insect bites from the night before, and she’s trying not to scratch her arms and legs raw.

  They are stalled in front of one of the mansions, fantasizing about the chandeliers and the circular staircases inside, when the aunt drops the n-word so casually that Leda thinks she has imagined it. But then the aunt drops the word again, and again, a grenade each time. Leda is surprised and uncomfortable. She looks at Patterson in profile, and sees that he is not shocked at all. The aunt and daughter-in-law continue their conversation about the interior of the homes. Leda wonders how the aunt will talk about her when she is not there. She knows the word was not directed at her, but she worries over it, turning it over, considering it in different lights, wondering if she is overreacting—she cannot banish the word from her thoughts. It occurs to Leda that an elaborate show is being put on for her, a California girl, a dark foreign girl—the food, the music.

  The aunt turns around and looks into the back seat at Leda and Patterson. “I used to ride bikes with my older sisters in this neighborhood when I was a little girl. One time, they went ahead, and I just walked into the house through the servant’s entrance. Nobody was there, so I climbed up the circular staircase to the second floor. The chandelier overhead was so big and bright it was like a snowball made of stars and fire. I thought I could touch it, and I leaned over the bannister, holding my hands out. I reached and reached, and almost fell over the railing when a little boy who lived there pulled me back. I ran right out of there as fast as I could.”

  Leda nods. She can see this in the aunt: the ghost of that young girl reaching for a ball of stars on the ceiling, the little boy pulling her back so she wouldn’t fall.

  Later that night, Leda and Patterson lie in the narrow guest bed together, uncomfortable under the nubby sheets, the mosquitoes devouring them. Above them is a needlepoint wall hanging that depicts a house. Over it in pastel pink script it says, Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.

  Leda asks whether they can return to the Left Coast.

  Patterson turns to face her on the starched pillow and the cold moonlight backlights his blond hair. His face is in dark shadow so she can’t read his expression. “You don’t really want to go back, do you? We’re having so much fun on the road.”

  “You’ve done all this before, and you’ll do it all again,” she says and hides part of her face in the pillow.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Go to sleep.” He turns over and he throws an arm around her. That business card Patterson gave the restaurant owner. Her original take on it, banished by lust and adrenaline, returns to her. Is it a genuine business card from a music store sales job as he claimed, or was it a card manufactured with Photoshop to create an elaborate illusion, a scam he knew in advance he would run and has run many times before with other girls in other places? Patterson’s arm is heavy on her chest, and she stares at the curved shadows on the ceiling, listens to the cicadas until dawn.

  ***

  On the following night, Patterson’s gaunt cousin, who drives a big rig, takes his mandatory rest break. He gathers the family to play pool in the basement. The basement is mummified in cobwebs, and stinks of mushrooms and standing water, and its periphery is piled with a jumble of cardboard moving boxes. The aunt thuds down the narrow stairs, carrying a six-pack of Coors and a jumbo bag of Fritos.

  She pulls rolling paper out of her pocket and shakes some bud into it as her son sidles around the table, racking up the balls. “I got something from one of the guys at work to make this more fun,” the son says.

  The aunt laughs. “You do have that bonus coming due.” Patterson grabs three cues leaned up against a cobwebby corner of the basement, and hands two to his aunt and cousin.

  Leaning the cue on the table, the cousin sprinkles some crystals on the green line and rolls it up, licking the edge of the paper to seal it. He lights the joint.

  “Your son wanted to come down to get his goodnight kiss,” his wife calls as she lumbers down the stairs. His son—tow-haired and already in his powder-blue pajamas, exuding sweetness and milk—pads toward his father, and the father swings him up and kisses all over his head, then swats him on the bottom, pushing him toward the stairs.

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, kids,” the wife says, gesturing at her husband’s anemic pink lips as the smoke swirls between them.

  “Too late,” he says, exhaling, and takes another drag before handing the joint to his mother. A faint aroma—acetone and doughnuts burning and cat piss—floods the basement. He looks around the room afte
r the wife and son are gone, and notes that Leda’s hands are empty. “Grab a cue.” He won’t make eye contact with her. Unnerving. She floats through the dust motes toward the fourth cue, still hanging in the dark corner.

  “Oh, she can’t play,” Patterson says.

  “What are you talking about?” Leda asks. “We’ve played a bunch of times.”

  “Well, all right, I didn’t want to say it straight up, but you’re not very good.” He turns to his cousin and says, “There are times she can’t even make contact.”

  “Like my wife,” the cousin says.

  “You can play on my team, honey,” the aunt says to Leda.

  They play eight-ball, and as the night wears on, the mood is increasingly raucous, and the basement is smoky. Nobody is tired except for Leda, who is thinking about a few snapshots Patterson has in his wallet of playing his bass in a band. She has never bothered to compare the real Fender Jazz bass to those pictures to see if it was the same one, or a replacement. She takes a handful of Fritos and a sip of her beer.

  “She’s not that bad,” the cousin tells Patterson. He is bouncing on the balls of his toes and drinking his fourth beer.

  “I can’t believe you would say I can’t play,” Leda says. “And truth be told, your aunt’s better than you.”

  “She is that,” Patterson admits.

  “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “Gonna let your lady talk to you like that?” the cousin asks, taking his shot.

  “We’ll see,” Patterson says, with an edge in his voice.

  Leda smiles and sets down her cue. “I’m beat,” she says. “Thanks for the game, guys.”

  When she gets upstairs, she opens Patterson’s wallet. She looks at the snapshots of Patterson with his band. They look like real aged photographs, but the bass, the one he had for so many years, looks different—blond wood instead of a deep red and black finish.

  At daybreak, they head along the coast toward Biloxi, steaming down the I-10 in the pickup. Patterson doesn’t turn on the radio or put in his CDs. They drive in an oppressive silence. The beaches are flat and paler than sawdust, a little ugly, with long docks running out into the placid waters and an array of gleaming sails rising from the boats moored there. “I’m feeling lucky!” he says as they start to approach the bright, hulking casinos. “Let’s hit the tables and go to the beach.” She is pretty sure he would want to hit the tables whether or not he was feeling lucky, but she mumbles her assent. Maybe the philosophy, the art, all of it, is a long con because he has intuited that her parents are rich, maybe he read her the way he reads their marks.

  They stop at a casino that rises above the ocean, plate glass windows gleaming like a wide silver spacecraft. Patterson has a craving for crawfish and they find a restaurant that sells them boiled. She orders a diet root beer, and sips it slowly, trying to make the sweet sassafras taste last. A waiter brings Patterson a plate of crawfish. They lie there with their bright red shells and necks intact. He offers her some crawfish, but she shakes her head and watches him dive into the plate, twisting the heads off the necks and sucking the juice from the opening. Next, he cracks the shell on the tail and stuffs the meat into his mouth. He sucks the claws. “Sure you don’t want some?” he asks. “It’s stupendous.” She wants to vomit.

  They hit the blackjack tables. Patterson likes blackjack because the only person he has to read at the table is the female dealer. Easy. “Do you want to play?” he asks. He hasn’t asked her what’s wrong, or what she’s thinking, or what she’d like to do. When she shakes her head, he asks if she wants to go to the spa and hands her a hundred-dollar bill. She can hear him flirting with the dealer as she walks away. She doesn’t visit the spa, but wanders in and out of stores, eying the merchandise and thinking about how much it would cost to buy a plane ticket home. Certainly more than one hundred dollars, but that might cover the cost of economy train fare or a bus. She thinks of all those days on a bus, backtracking to her ordinary, sterile suburban life, the life she grew up in and grew out of, and the idea of going on, the way she always has, disappearing into her childhood room with its framed Degas prints and Andrew Lang fairytale books and white writing desk, seems simultaneously comforting and horrifying. She could take the elevator upstairs and ring her parents, ask them to wire the money for airfare—they wouldn’t make her beg or anything—but she feels too ashamed to explain that her adventure has turned sour, just as her mother feared it would, and to return home defeated.

  She returns to the hotel room, and flops on the bed, burying her face in the pillows, and takes a long nap, her sleep suffused with dreams of Patterson’s tattoos unpeeling from the skin on his arms, lifting off his body and flying away, leaving only that ugly pink keloid behind. When she wakes her mouth is bone dry and her head pounds from sleeping too long. Patterson is changing into clothes. “How’d you do?” she asks.

  He takes out bills, unfolds them and swats at them with his hand. “We’re goin’ big tonight,” he drawls.

  They hang out in an old-fashioned bar, draped in crimson velvet with a zinc bar. Roy Orbison’s voice plays on the jukebox. Crying over you. Patterson orders a top-shelf habanero pepper margarita and turns to her. “May I have this dance?” he asks.

  They revolve around the center of the dark room, the only ones dancing. The wall behind the zinc bar is backlit with violet light that makes the bottles of spirits shimmer, and slowly that wall, all the walls, recede into the distance. As she presses against Patterson, she feels her feet softening, losing gravity. He’s embracing her, willing her, the her that is her and not somebody else, to disappear, swallowing her. Her arms pressed around his shoulders sink, disappearing into the red and white checks of his shirt like butter in a hot pan, into the smell of his damp hair, like wet hay, and the zingy spiciness of his shaving cream.

  ***

  Leda wakes before Patterson, as she always does after a night of heavy drinking. Her thighs are sore. She can’t sleep, and she feels grateful for that. He sleeps soundly and quietly, naked under the single white sheet, his blond hair gleaming against his neck, and she tugs a paisley comforter over him. She pulls on her T-shirt and hoodie and slides her jeans over her hips, the clothes she wore when she met him. She steps into flip-flops she picked up at a drugstore and leaves her suede boots and the new clothes she bought along the way, hoping that by leaving the illusion of her return she will buy more time to run.

  On the dresser is Patterson’s brown leather wallet, and the corners of bills are poking out of it. The air conditioner is on, but her palms are sweating, moisture collecting in the whorls on her fingers. She carefully slides most of the bills from the wallet and folds them and pushes them into her jeans pocket.

  A sound from the bed and she turns, her skin burning hot. She opens her mouth to explain. But he has only burrowed deeper under the covers. She worked up the marks too and should have been given half the spoils. She can hear her own heart gonging in her chest and is surprised that he doesn’t sense anything is amiss. She tells herself that, Dionysian that he is, it could very well be him sneaking out and abandoning her in a hotel. With her backpack, she slips out of the hotel room, and releases the handle slowly. It makes a quiet clicking sound.

  The sun is warm and the air like wet cotton and salty. A bracing sea breeze swirls up toward her face. Leda convinces a businessman loading his suitcases into a yellow taxicab to let her share the cost of a ride to the airport. The sugar beach and warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico stretch out, deep and boundless and sparkling through the scratched cab window. She imagines for a moment that Patterson will come running after the cab, screaming that he’s been robbed, perhaps crying and heartbroken, but just as quickly she realizes this would be ridiculous. It has only been a little over a month, even if it feels like a lifetime. Far more likely—he will wait for a while, and then he will understand what has happened. She glances through the back window of the cab. The silver casino is shrinking into the middle ground, and then disappearing in
to the distance. Noting his plush, dark red leather briefcase and his elegant, burnished cufflinks, Leda turns to the businessman to make light chitchat about where he is from and where he is going. Patterson read her after all, and surely, he must have guessed she was capable of this.

  Even from one hundred feet up, the air smells of dust and dirt. The sky is bone-dry blue over land as barren as burned flesh, and in the orchards, the fruit trees are pale and skeletal. Industrious farmers scurry over the fields, hand-watering crops with the last of the reservoir water. Pine trees break the horizon like crooked teeth. She scans the inside of the observatory, adjusts the baby on her hip.

  Double-paned windows run nearly the length of the pine walls on all four sides. Nestled in the one corner of the observatory is a small kitchenette with a toaster oven and a hot plate, its base covered in black drips. In the adjacent corner hangs an old pink shower curtain that hides a flush toilet. The lookout is supposed to call the scientists and inventors from a rotary phone on a table in the center of the observatory if she spies anything resembling a cloud, so they can seed it: rockets filled with silver iodide shot into the cloud, the iodide wrapping itself in moisture until it can no longer hold the water. This is what they tell her.

  No television. The radio mostly comes in as mumbling and static. The baby cries with hunger. Otherwise, cool silence inside the observatory. She reminds herself that she should name the baby soon, but for now, she sits by the window and latches the small mouth to her breast. She searches the horizon for clouds. There are binoculars next to the rotary phone to help spot faraway clouds in a pinch, but most days all she witnesses from the windows are shades of blue: a bright blue, a powder blue, an eggshell blue, a grey-blue, a lunar blue, a midnight blue, Delft blue, aquamarine. She grows so attuned to the subtlest differences she does not need the binoculars, and as days pass, the minute shifts in hue become a kind of drama. If she stares too long, she starts to perceive differences in the blue of the southern sky and the blue of the eastern sky. Other times, she is convinced the changes are just her imagination finding ways to create and articulate differences, the way a couple with all the same interests and similar personalities eventually, through the depraved power of monogamy, start to believe they are wholly different sorts of people. Some days the shades of blue compel her to write poetry, almost. Some days a hawk floats by or a crow smashes headlong into the glass windows. Passerines circle the observatory, hovering on the wind with wings raised. Perhaps they are searching for a perch. The lookout likes to think they find a home on the top of the observatory where she can’t see them.