Cerise rolls her eyes and stares at the black television screen. It gives back a bowed reflection of her sitting in the room alone, a skinny little dark person curved at the edge in a chair. Cerise raises her mittens and stares at the screen. When she moves her arms toward the middle of the room, the mittens get ever so much bigger.
During the brunch crunch, the biggest they’ve ever had, Ariel finds Javier in the walk-in cooler. She closes the door behind her and blocks him from leaving. “He kissed me,” she says quietly.
Javier won’t even look at her face. He seems very angry, as she suspected.
“I went to bed alone,” she continues, “as I think you know.” He and Warren walked Ariel to her door. She picks up a case of Freixenet.
“And you leave after to meet the black man,” Javier almost hisses.
“I did no such thing.”
“How do I know?”
“Javier, why would I bother talking to you now with the door closed? Do you know what risks I’m taking?”
“Nobody sees us.”
“I did not leave the hotel. I wanted you to come to my room.”
Javier lifts his head from his metal pan of collected ingredients, his pounds of butter and quarts of cream. His eyes. Hmm. Ariel backs up, taps the safety release, and spins out into the kitchen. “So, please, you’ll have to be more aware of sodium,” Ariel says, hauling the case of cava.
She tries to imagine salvaging anything after last night. Her orgasm came hard as a ton of rocks, alone in her room, her head full of two men. It could have been better, she thinks, lugging the case to the bar. Could’ve been better. Where’s her manager-on-duty? Ariel shouldn’t have to heft anything in heels like these.
In her office, Ariel’s cell rings at two in the afternoon. Everyone at the hotel has heard the news about the mayor’s request to give the city another day before returning. Seeing the Gupta phone number pop up on her caller ID, Ariel stands and paces. She still might have a chance. “Hello,” she answers.
“Ariel,” Ed says, “oh, save me. I’m dying to get out of here.”
“Why? What’s the matter?”
“It’s … there’s … I don’t know. It’s chaos. All the people.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure I can explain right now.” He sighs heavily. “We’re okay. It’s just not great times, if you know what I mean.”
“When are you coming back?”
“You’re okay with our staying another night?”
“What?” Ariel paces faster, watching the indentations her heels leave in the tasteful patterned carpeting of her office.
“You didn’t hear?” Ed asks. “The mayor wants us to stay away if we can for another day. Fear of the highways getting blocked again. This is abysmal, Ariel.”
“What’s so horrible?” she asks before she wishes to take it back. Of course, as a sympathetic mother and wife, she would know exactly what’s not so much fun about an evacuation road trip.
“I’ll tell you when I see you,” he says. “I don’t want to be a glutton with the Guptas’ phone. Anyway.” He pauses. “I miss you.”
“I miss you too,” Ariel says. She doesn’t even want to consider the potential truth of her statement. She hopes, only, that it comes from a decent place in her little black heart. “Are the kids nearby?”
“They’re swimming,” Ed says. “Somebody has a pool. It has a giant mosquito net around it. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“You can see them from where you are?”
“The Guptas are watching. I’m in the front yard.”
“Give Miles and Ella big kisses for me. Make me out to be a superhero, right?”
“Right.”
There’s another pause. “Ariel?”
She sucks in a breath. “Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.” She presses the on/off button with her thumb.
Jolly, buzzed Chef Warren soaks in the praise of employees and patrons alike at the bar. Were he to accept all the offers to buy him drinks, he’d land himself in the hospital. Still, he’s taken advantage of more than a few so far. Ariel admits he saved the day with his perfect orchestration of every meal for the entire hurricane scare. Tomorrow’s breakfast will be difficult with relatively meager supplies, but Ariel has complete faith in her friend now.
Whether or not he truly has any faith in her, she doesn’t know. Possibly. He’s at least pretending he believes that Ariel didn’t initiate the kiss with Phatty. She told Warren about her talk with Greenback today and how he apologized for Phatty’s indiscretion. She told Warren about how it seems Phatty’s reputation for just such ‘attacks’ has landed him two sexual harassment suits to date. She wishes she might somehow get Warren to share the information with Javier, but that’s not something she could ever ask. Imagine: “Oh, and can you tell Javier too?”
Javier, Warren’s officially anointed right-hand man as of the toast half an hour ago, remains in the hotel after his double shift, a glimmer of hope for Ariel in the gesture. At the moment, Javier flirts openly with a Greenback hanger-on, a woman who scowled at Ariel the night before. The woman has set her two-thousand-dollar handbag prominently on the bar. With ostentatiously long fingernails painted gold, she pets the Italian leather of it now and again as though to keep it from barking. She needs a leash.
Come on, Javier, you can do better than that.
Ariel believes it’s for show. He’s still here, which means Henny’s still away. They need to get rid of Warren. Well, get him drunk enough that he’ll have no suspicions at all.
And nobody else’s inklings either. Keep the prying eyes off Ariel’s room.
It’s possible.
Ariel makes the GM rounds, moving from one cocktail table to another asking patrons about their stays, making small talk. She catches herself saying the same things over and over again: “Yes, we were lucky.” “Oh, no kidding!” “Let’s hope it’s not practice for the real thing.” As she goes, she keeps a steady eye on her surroundings. She’ll check with the front desk in a little while. Last she heard, they have over 80 percent checking out in the morning, some requests for late checkouts, and Greenback still hangin’ around till further notice. Housekeeping’s collecting overtime, so none of them are bitching too loudly yet. Tomorrow might prove different with the masses leaving, but for now it’s all copasetic. Except for Javier and Ariel.
She’s a GM. If she can’t string this thing together, she’s worthless.
It’s the last night. Time to take what she wants.
He knocks, and she opens her door. He walks in.
She’s not been up here long, long enough only to use the bidet. He closes the door behind him.
She steps backwards till her ass, in its skirt, finds the wall closest to the bathroom. She has decided how this will happen. Slowly. Languorously. In all the rooms.
He seems to think otherwise. He seems to think she is someone deserving of a sauce, or a spanking, or a blindfold.
Her husband will be a cuckold in minutes. She will be something else. She doesn’t know the word for it yet.
This light brown man takes her hand and leads her away from the wall and into the bedroom of her suite. Wait.
He holds her hand aloft, near her shoulder, as if they were beginning a dance. He kisses the very tips of her fingers and breathes in. She believes he kisses to test for what he wants. Her fingers are rosemary and orange flower water and goose fat and his grandmother’s tamales. If he licks them she will use them, wet, to feel his earlobes. She will run them up the sides of his neck.
He only kisses. She warms anyway.
It has to be enough to block out the noise of everything else, the names of her children.
He kneels. Standing, she stares at the top of his head. His hair, so short, shows his scalp. He rounds his shoulders to remove her shoes.
She grabs the back of his collar and pulls him off the floor. His fingers graze the insides of her thighs as he rises.
/> They kiss. She likes to kiss, very much. She likes to spend time on mouths.
He kisses and moves his mouth over her neck. He stops and sucks, and she has to push him off for the mark he seems wanting to leave on her throat.
As his answer, he pushes her down on the bedspread. She props up on her elbows and watches as he unbuttons his shirt. He exposes a tattoo, of what she cannot exactly discern. There is a heart, maybe, a knife or thorns. He tucks his hands around behind her where she lies, unzips her skirt, and pulls it off. He unbuttons and unzips his pants, bends, pushes her knees together, and straddles her own with his. He crouches and runs his hands over her silk blouse in a motion of reverence. She is Mary in blue. He will move up to her mouth and take her tongue into his mouth and next take her, pushing her underwear to the side.
But he hovers over her breasts still contained in their blouse and bra. He rubs on them. He will conjure a genie soon. His erection, having escaped his shorts, pokes through the slit.
He is hard, and he is not her husband, and he wants to be here or he would not be here at all with his girlfriend away and his boss boozily installed in another suite, and she decides now is the time to reach for the condom under the pillow. She pushes down his boxers. She rolls it on.
He drags her underwear down her legs. They catch at her ankles.
She still in her blouse and bra and heels and he in his gold chain and scent of grease, of just plain kitchen grease, fuck hard on top of the bedspread.
He stares straight into her eyes as if he might find something to kill in her pupils. She, in turn, reaches down to cup his testicles. She knows he understands what she holds in her hand.
It’s a game they play.
Last night, Fearius let himself be trapped up with his own family for exactly four hours before it came clear aint nothing making its way to New Orleans gone kill him or his people.
Today he hoofed it something fierce, pullin numbers like Alphonse maybe never seen for the lil old shit Pigeontown street Fearius work, and still. Fearius know he got stomped down to the bottom of the latrine. You step up and win or you step up and lose. Fearius got the second.
And how many days now he have to prove himself? Ten or ten times ten? Who know. He just fucked. Fifteen years of age and fucked till he die or till he make nice again with Alphonse. Time for nothing but to work and work overtime, ya heard.
Right now he lie in the front room while all the babies sleep, all the family besides him sleeping in the back rooms. Muzzle still hangin up in Touro.
The last while, the Moms and Pops not so stupid they think Fearius goin to school, but they still pretend with the hours he keeps. Fearius rise same as them and his cryin nieces and nephews, and they eat some something, and then on her shift days she work the morning, his Moms say good bye and love you and all three of them leave the house. Maybe half the days Angelique make it outside the house and visit some classes. If she keep up with high school and the grades she earn, she be done when she make 25. But she stayed out of babies so far.
So Alphonse get all Fearius dollars, all, for the day, the biggest day the firm probably ever have, and Fearius, he still be in the shithole. But he aint expired. He lie watching a movie starring a white vigilante on his Moms and Pops TV in the middle the night.
It aint bad always. One, one thirty in the AM. Least he dont have no broken leg and be hung up in a hospital, yo.
And at least Fearius still breathing.
14
Something rises. An escalator in Prancie’s head has opened a square hole into which she can ascend, and she will follow it. It is a mechanism to the skies. Freedom.
“It had to come sooner or later,” Joe says. He breathes deeply. Prancie sits beside him on their back porch. Leaves will not change color in New Orleans, and the earth will not harden with frost, but a dry wind has finally brought with it the season of autumn.
Shane Geautreaux would say, ‘It ain’t perfect, but I’ll take what I can get.’ Prancie can hear him clearly.
It is October 20th, and Joe is still here. Despite Prancie’s preparations, he seems to have no intentions of going elsewhere.
“When’s the last time you saw these?” Joe asks and lifts his shirt. His scar remains below his belt. Prancie does not know to what he refers. The meager hairs of his chest?
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Look,” he says. “My ribs.” For over a month now, Joe has remained effervescently happy despite his treatments. Philomenia cannot comprehend his state of mind nor its source. He is neither a man of great faith nor a man of bravery. And now he is a man of very little hair. The day Prancie returned from the Tokyo Rose to find Joe shaved bald by his careperson, she gasped. Now, however, she has grown used to the sight of his naked pate. She finds it smooth to the touch. In turn, she no longer fancies the mayor whatsoever.
Her daily kindness to Joe comes in the evenings when she touches his head, her fingers light as feathers. He closes his eyes and groans. His reactions do not appeal to Prancie. She creates new horoscope signs on the dome of his skull, connecting freckles.
It is true. Joe has lost a goodly amount of weight. The cancer has served him well in terms of his physique. “I believe I saw those last when we only dated,” Philomenia says of Joe’s ribs. She should find his improved form appealing, she tells herself. It should spark some form of appreciation in her.
Joe nods, smiles, and pats his shrunken stomach. “Looks better too, don’t you think?”
Prancie does not want to think about Joe’s stomach. The cool breeze comes on, and Joe lowers his shirt, raises his nose to the air, and inhales loudly once again. “It’s wonderful,” he says.
“Yes,” Prancie says, wishing instead to inhale the dank perfume of the Tokyo Rose. She has promised Joe three nights a week. Tonight she must attend to him, but Prancie senses Shane across the street. Shane Geautreaux sits, of course, in his usual seat and compliments other women less deserving than Prancie.
What will Shane eat today? He has come to depend on her cooking. He has spurred Prancie to new heights of culinary expertise. But on these nights that she remains chained to Joe, Shane resorts to fast food, he has told her. Such a pathetic option! Prancie has often suggested he try some of the local restaurant fare. They live in New Orleans, for goodness’ sake. He says that dining alone is no dinner at all. She supposes she knows what he means.
Some weeks back, niggled with something she could not clearly identify, Prancie started creating special plates for Shane in order to spare him from her usual fare. She set aside a portion of food before mixing her special ingredient into the larger whole. Alas, she found the man such a devotee to her cooking that he nearly always took seconds and sometimes even thirds from the communal pots and warming trays.
She no longer adds her special ingredient. Prancie will find a way to address the other patrons soon enough. For now, however, she cannot endanger an intelligent and thoughtful man.
Tonight, dinner in her house will no doubt prove to be equally as distasteful as Shane’s fast food. Chemotherapy and a colostomy add up to nothing delicious when it comes to dinner. Yogurt or creamed soup.
Joe pretends that he wishes Philomenia to eat regular fare without him, but she remains true. She has always remained true to him despite her desire to do otherwise.
Staring out at the blue sky of the October afternoon, she thinks yet again about What Might Have Been, what might have been had she not ignored the signs of that day, the first day of these last several decades. Her brain returns to it like a tongue to a canker sore after having eaten too much sour. She has thought too much sour as well.
It’s all good, she tries to remind herself at the advice of Tokyo Rose friends.
That first day, when they were still only engaged, Joe’s hair was disheveled. His mouth seemed irritated, his lips enlarged.
“You ate something spicy at lunch?” Philomenia asked.
He laughed and then said, “You could say that.”
/> She wore her yellow sundress. They sat on the balcony of his family’s home on St. Charles Avenue in the wide shade of the old live oak. She had absolutely no idea what he told her whatsoever. Philomenia felt herself blush with the teasing she believed directed at her.
Why she thought it would be flattering to carry a hand fan like some Spanish flamenco dancer, Prancie has no idea. Philomenia switched it open with a snap of her wrist. She considered herself to be beautiful. What man would not wait for such a flower?
She remembers the streetcar passing noisily on the tracks. She remembers she said, “Must they squeal so much?”
She remembers Joe becoming sullen as the martinis he said he had at lunch wore off.
She remembers thinking her pedicure looked perfect.
The watching hour approaches. Prancie relishes it above all others. Her porch is quite obscured, tastefully, by variegated ginger. While she can see out, when the overhead light is switched off, none can see her.
Philomenia carefully rinses and loads their two bowls and two spoons into the dishwasher and stares out the window over the sink. She has opened all the windows in the house this evening, letting in the air. Next door, the Guptas prepare something that begins with garlic and onions and turmeric. Since Prancie began cooking for the Tokyo Rose, she has found foreign odors less offensive, although she cannot imagine why. It is possible they will carry her into her new future. Prancie inhales, readies herself, and returns to Joe in his room.
He laughs at a commercial. He laughs out loud, shaking his head. Philomenia sees nothing funny about it. Most of television these days perplexes her, as though it has moved away from her somehow or begun to employ a new language.
“Come sit!” Joe commands and pats the hospital bed.
“You are wide awake tonight,” she says, perching her bottom on the mattress’ edge.
“I feel wonderful, Phil. I really do.”
He teases her as well. They have long agreed that he cannot shorten her name. He does not know her new one. She has determined he never will. “I am glad you are feeling well tonight.”
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