He went for that walk on a day when Julia was teaching, and a plump brown dumpling of a woman named Lucille came to see to Mr. Roussard. When Julia got home he was waiting for her on the front stoop. “It’s all arranged,” he said. “Lucille’s agreed to stay late, so let’s you and I go to an early movie and a nice dinner.”
The movie was a romantic comedy, with Hugh Grant in the Cary Grant role. Dinner was in the French Quarter, served in a high-ceilinged room by waiters who looked almost old enough to be playing Dixieland jazz at Preservation Hall. Keller ordered a bottle of wine with dinner, and they each had a glass and agreed it was very nice, but they left the rest of the bottle unfinished.
They’d taken her car, and when it came time to drive home she handed him her keys. It was a mild night, and the air had a tropical feel to it. Sultry, he thought. That was the word for it.
Neither of them spoke on the way home. Lucille lived nearby, and wouldn’t accept a ride, and just shook her head when Keller offered to walk her home.
He waited in the kitchen while Julia checked on her father. He couldn’t sit still and walked around, opening doors, peering into cupboards. Everything’s close to perfect, he thought, and now you’re about to screw it up.
It seemed to him that she was taking forever, but then she came up behind him and stood looking over his shoulder. “All these sets of dishes,” she said. “Things accumulate when a family lives in the same place forever. There’ll be some yard sale here one of these days.”
“It’s nice, living in a place with a history.”
“I suppose.”
He turned toward her and smelled her perfume. She hadn’t been wearing scent earlier.
He drew her close, kissed her.
25
“You know what I was worried about? I was afraid I wouldn’t remember how to do it.”
“I guess it all came back to you,” he said. “Been a while, has it?”
“Ages.”
“Same for me.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “You, running around the country, having adventures everywhere?”
“The running around I’ve been doing lately, the only women who spoke to me were asking me did I want to supersize that order of fries. Imagine if they asked you that at a good restaurant. ‘Sir, would you care to supersize that coq au vin?’”
“But before Des Moines,” she said. “I’ll bet you had a girl in every port.”
“Hardly. I’m trying to remember the last time I was… with anybody. All I can tell you is it’s been a long time.”
“My daddy asked me if we were sleeping together.”
“Just now?”
“No, he never even stirred. I think Lucille let him get at the Maker’s Mark. The doctor doesn’t want him drinking, but he doesn’t want him smoking, either, and I say what difference can it possibly make? No, this was a couple of days ago. ‘You an’ that fine-looking young man sleeping together, chère?’ You’re still a young man to Daddy, even the way I got your hair fixed.”
“He asked me, too.”
“He didn’t!”
“That first time you left me alone with him. He came right out and asked me if I was sleeping with you.”
“I don’t know why I should be surprised. It’s just like him. What did you say?”
“That I wasn’t, of course. What’s so funny?”
“Well, that’s not what I told him.”
He propped himself up on an elbow, stared at her. “Why on earth would you—”
“Because I didn’t want to tell him one thing and then have to go back and tell him another. Oh, come on, don’t tell me you didn’t know this was going to happen.”
“Well, I had hopes.”
“‘Well, I had hopes.’ You must have known when you asked me out to dinner.”
“By that time,” he said, “they were high hopes.”
“I was afraid you’d make a move that first night. Inviting you to stay here, and after I did it struck me that you might think that was more of an invitation than I had in mind. And that would have been the last thing I wanted just then.”
“After what happened in the park? It was the last thing I would have suggested.”
“All I wanted,” she said, “was to do a favor for someone who had saved my life. Except—”
“Except what?”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking this consciously at the time. But looking back, I might not have dragged you home if you didn’t look real cute.”
“Cute?”
“With your full head of shaggy dark hair. Don’t worry, you’re even cuter now.” She reached to stroke his hair. “There’s only one thing. I don’t know what to call you.”
“Oh.”
“I know your name, or at least the names they put in the paper. But I haven’t called you by name, or asked what to call you, because I don’t want to say the wrong thing sometime with other people around. And you were talking about getting a new set of ID.”
“Yes, I want to get started on that.”
“Well, you don’t know what name it’ll be, do you? So I want to wait until you do and start out calling you by your new name.”
“That makes sense.”
“But it would be nice to have something to call you at intimate moments,” she said. “There was a moment before when you said my name, and I have to say it gave me a little tingle.”
“Julia,” he said.
“It works better in context. Anyway, I don’t know what to call you at moments like that. I could try cher, I suppose, but it seems sort of generic.”
“Keller,” he said. “You could call me Keller.”
In the morning he backed his car out of the garage and visited cemeteries until a tombstone inscription provided him with the name of a male child who’d died in infancy forty-five years ago. He copied down the name and date of birth, and the next day he headed downtown and asked around until he found the Bureau of Records.
“Got to replace everything,” he told the clerk. “I had this little house in St. Bernard’s Parish, so do I have to tell you what happened?”
“I’d say you lost everything,” the woman said.
“I went to Galveston first,” he said, “and then I headed up north and stayed with my sister in Altoona. That’s in Pennsylvania.”
“Seems to me I’ve heard of Altoona. Is it nice?”
“Well, I guess it’s okay,” he said, “but it’s good to be home.”
“Always good to be home,” she agreed. “Now if you could just let me have your name and date of birth — oh, you’ve got it all written down, haven’t you? That saves asking you how to spell it, not that Nicholas Edwards presents all that much of a challenge.”
He went home with a copy of Nicholas Edwards’s birth certificate, and by the end of the week he had passed a driving test and been rewarded with a Louisiana driver’s license. He counted up his cash and used half of what he had left to open a bank account, showing his new driver’s license as ID. A clerk at the main post office had passport application forms, and he filled one out and sent it, along with a money order and the requisite pair of photos, to the office in Washington.
“Nick,” Julia said, looking from his face to the photo on his license, then back at him again. “Or do you prefer Nicholas?”
“My friends call me Mr. Edwards.”
“I think I’ll introduce you as Nick,” she said, “because that’s what people are going to call you anyway. But I’ll be the one person that calls you Nicholas.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so,” she said, and took hold of his arm. “But when we’re upstairs,” she said, “I’ll go right on calling you Keller.”
She came upstairs with him every evening, then returned to her bed in the first-floor den in case her father needed her during the night. Both professed regret at the enforced separation, but on reflection Keller realized he was just as happy to wake up alone. He had a hunch Julia probably felt the same way.
One night, after they’d finished their lovemaking but before she slipped out of his bed, he mentioned something that had been on his mind a while. “I’m running out of money,” he said. “I’m not spending much, but there’s none coming in, and what’s left won’t last too much longer.”
She said she had a little money, and he said that wasn’t really the point. He’d always paid his own way, and wasn’t comfortable otherwise. She asked if that was why he’d mowed the front lawn the day before.
“No, I was getting something from the car” — the gun, still in the glove compartment, which he’d finally gotten around to relocating to his dresser drawer — “and I saw the mower, and earlier I’d noticed the grass needed cutting, so I went and did it. An old man with one of those aluminum walkers watched me for a few minutes and asked me what kind of money I got for a job like that. I told him they didn’t pay me a dime, but I got to sleep with the lady of the house.”
“You didn’t tell him that. Did you? You just made that whole thing up.”
“Well, not all of it. I really did mow the lawn.”
“And did Mr. Leonidas stop and watch you?”
“No, but I’ve seen him around, so I put him in the story.”
“Well, he was the perfect choice, because he’d have told his wife, and his wife would have broadcast it to half the city before you’d put the mower back in the garage. What am I going to do with you, Keller?”
“Oh, you’ll think of something,” he said.
And in the morning she poured his coffee and said, “I was thinking. I guess what you have to do is get a job.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“You don’t know how to get a job?”
“I’ve never actually had one.”
“You’ve never—”
“I take that back. When I was in high school I worked for this older guy, he’d get jobs cleaning out people’s attics and basements, and he’d make his real money selling what he got paid to haul away. I was his helper.”
“And since then?”
“Since then, the kind of work I’ve done and the people I’ve worked for, you don’t need a Social Security card. Nick Edwards applied for one, incidentally. It should turn up in the mail any day now.”
She thought for a moment. “There’s a lot of work in the city these days,” she said. “Could you do construction?”
“You mean like building houses?”
“Maybe something a little less ambitious. Working with a crew, renovating and remodeling. Putting up Sheetrock, spackling and painting, sanding floors.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t suppose you need a graduate degree in engineering for that sort of thing, but it probably helps if you know what you’re doing.”
“You haven’t been doing it in a while, so your skills are a little rusty.”
“That sounds good.”
“And they did it a little differently where you come from.”
“That too. You’re not too bad at making up stories yourself, Miss Julia.”
“If I do a good job,” she said, “they’ll let me sleep with the gardener. I think it’s time for me to make a couple of phone calls.”
26
The next day he showed up at the job site, on a narrow side street off Napoleon Avenue. A longtime tenant had died, leaving the upstairs flat vacant and in need of a gut rehab. “Owner says turn it into a loft, one big room with an open kitchen,” said the contractor, a rawboned blond named Donny. “You missed the fun part, ripping them walls out. Let me tell you, it gives you a feeling.”
Now they had half the place Sheetrocked, and the next step would be painting, walls and ceiling, and when that was done they’d work on the floors. How was he with a roller, and how did he feel about ladders? He was fine with ladders, he said, and he’d be okay with a roller, though he might be a little rusty at first. “You just take your time,” Donny said. “Be no time at all before it all comes back to you. I just hope ten bucks an hour is all right with you ’cause that’s what I’m paying.”
He started with the ceiling, he knew enough to do that, and he’d used a paint roller before, painting his own apartment in New York. Donny had a look from time to time, and gave him a tip now and then, mostly about how to position the ladder so he wouldn’t have to move it as often. But evidently he was doing okay, and when he took the occasional break he managed to watch the others nailing sections of Sheetrock in place and covering the seams with joint compound. It didn’t look all that tricky, not once you knew what it was you were supposed to do.
He worked seven hours that first day and left with seventy dollars more than he’d started with, and an invitation to show up at eight the next morning. His legs ached a little, from all that climbing up and down the ladder, but it was a good ache, like you’d get from a decent workout at the gym.
He stopped to pick up flowers on the way home.
“That was Patsy,” Julia told him, after hanging up the phone. Patsy Morrill, he remembered, was a high school classmate of Julia’s; her name had been Patsy Wallings before she got married, and Donny Wallings was her kid brother. Patsy had called, Julia told him, to say that Donny had called her to thank her for sending Nick his way.
“He says you don’t say much,” she reported, “but you don’t miss much, either. ‘He’s not a guy that you have to tell him something twice.’ His very words, according to Patsy.”
“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” he said, “but by the time we were done for the day, I guess I pretty much got the hang of it.”
The next day he did some more painting, finishing the rest of the ceiling and starting in on the walls, and the day after that there were three of them, all painting, and Donny had switched him to a brush and put him to work on the wood trim. “On account of you got a steadier hand than Luis,” he explained privately, “and you’re not in such a damn rush.”
When the paint job was finished, he showed up as instructed at eight, and there were just the two of them, him and Donny. He wouldn’t be using Luis for the next couple of days, Donny confided, because the man didn’t know dick about sanding floors.
“Actually,” Keller said, “neither do I.”
That was okay with Donny. “Least I can explain it to you in English,” he said, “and y’all’ll pick it up a damn sight faster’n Luis would.”
The whole job lasted fifteen days, and when it was done the place looked beautiful, with a new open-plan kitchen installed and a new tile floor in the bathroom. The only part he didn’t care for was sanding the wood floors, because you had to wear a mask to keep from breathing the dust, and it got in your hair and your clothes and your mouth. He wouldn’t have wanted to do it day in and day out, but a couple of days’ worth now and then was no big deal. Laying ceramic tile in the bathroom, on the other hand, was a genuine pleasure, and he was sorry when that part of the job was over, and proud of how it looked.
The owner had shown up a couple of times to see how the job was going, and when it was finished she inspected everything and pronounced herself highly satisfied. She gave him and Luis each a hundred-dollar bonus, and she told Donny she’d have another job for him to look at in a week or so.
“Donny says she’ll be able to ask fifteen hundred a month for the place,” he told Julia. “The way we’ve got it fixed up.”
“She can ask it. She might have to take a little less, but I don’t know. Rents are funny now. She might get fifteen hundred at that.”
“In New York,” he said, “you’d get five or six thousand for a space like that. And they wouldn’t expect ceramic tile in the bathroom, either.”
“I hope you didn’t mention that to Donny.”
And of course he hadn’t, because the story they’d gone with was that he was Julia’s boyfriend, which was true enough, and that he’d followed her down from Wichita, which wasn’t. Sooner or later, he thought, someone familiar with the place would ask him a question about life in Wichita, and by then he hoped
he’d know something about the city beyond the fact that it was somewhere in Kansas.
A friend of Donny’s called a day or two later. He had a paint job coming up, just walls, as the ceiling was okay. Three days for sure, maybe four, and he could pay the same ten bucks an hour. Could Nick use the work?
They wrapped it up in three days, and he had the weekend and two more days free before Donny rang up to say that he’d bid on that job and got it, and could Nick come by first thing the next morning? Keller wrote down the address and said he’d be there.
“I’ll tell you,” he said to Julia, “I’m beginning to believe I can make a living this way.”
“I don’t know why not. If I can make a living teaching fourth grade—”
“But you’ve got qualifications.”
“What, a teaching certificate? You’ve got qualifications, too. You’re sober, you show up on time, you do what you’re told, you speak English, and you don’t think you’re too good for the job. I’m proud of you, Nicholas.”
He was used to Donny and the others calling him Nick, and he was getting used to being called Nicholas by Julia. She still called him Keller in bed, but he could sense that would change, and that was okay. He’d been lucky, he realized, in that the name he’d found in St. Patrick’s Cemetery was one he could live with. That hadn’t been a consideration when he was squinting at weathered headstones, all he’d cared about was that the dates worked, but he saw now that he could have been saddled with a far less acceptable name than Nick Edwards.
He’d taken to giving her half his pay for his share of the rent and household expenses. She’d protested at first that it was too much, but he insisted, and she didn’t fight too hard. And what did he need money for, aside from buying gas for the car? (Although it might not be a bad idea to save up for a new car, or at least a new used car, because he was fine until somebody asked to see his registration.)
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