by Chris Wiltz
“You are,” she said, “a despicable human being.”
“That's good,” I told her. “I hope you include that when you recommend me to your clients who are sleazy enough to need the services of a detective. In my business, ‘despicable’ translates as effective.”
“A lowlife,” she said with disgust.
3
Diana
You might think what I said to Pinkie means I'm not particular about women. Not so.
Hell, I have a history of being particular about women. For instance, Diana DiCarlo. Thirty-two, five foot seven, dark brown hair that took a straight and elegant plunge before curling gently under her chin, a body that looked long and willowy under her fashionable clothes, but was substantial enough to give you something to hold on to. It's true—I always like something to hold on to. She said not to let the name fool you, that she was French—Parisian French—descended from the early French settlers, and she looked it, with that smooth fair skin and those chocolate-drop eyes.
Diana was the most imperious woman I'd ever known except maybe old Grandma Rafferty, who was just as haughty and demanding. Diana was also smart and independent. She had a glamorous job as assistant director of public relations for a swank French Quarter hotel.
Plenty of men lined up for a chance to take Diana out, and every once in a while she went with one of them. That was okay. It didn't kill me, and the less it seemed to kill me, the less interested she seemed to be in anyone else.
So the princess and I were having a pretty good time, mostly in between the sheets, but I figured one of us would get bored with the scenario sooner or later. I had no delusions about the permanence of our togetherness. We were from two different worlds, two different backgrounds, which I admit was one of the attractions. Not only that, I had decided I was set in my ways and liked living alone. Of course, I had assumed that was true of Maurice, too.
On the night of our dinner with Maurice and Nita, Diana had to go to a cocktail party thrown by some conventioneers staying at the hotel. I called Maurice and told him we'd be late, and lounged in front of the TV with a couple of Scotches before it was time to pick up Diana.
She was waiting for me in front of the hotel. I had warned her over the phone to be out there when she said she'd be so I wouldn't have to sit parked in the passenger zone like some damned chauffeur. Making people wait was one of the ways Diana controlled them, and I refused to put up with it.
The November air was cool and breezy. Diana had on a short fur cape over a black dress. I reached over and opened the car door. She slid into the seat next to me with the sound of silky materials rubbing against each other and the smell of Shalimar masking the odor of smoke-saturated upholstery. The cape slipped into the space between the seats when she leaned into me with a long deep kiss. The dress was strapless.
She broke the kiss off just short of hot house flowers sprouting full grown from the car seats. “Hello, darling.”
One of her arms came from around my neck and her hand began making its way down the front of my shirt. I held it against me, stopping it.
“Princess,” I said, “we're on our way to meet the love of Maurice's life. Save it for later.”
“Okay.” She straightened herself in the seat and smoothed her dress down where it had ridden halfway up her thigh. “But not too much later.”
I drove uptown to Franky and Johnny's, a bar and restaurant on Arabella Street, half a block from the river. It's actually in the basement of an old raised house, with a blond brick façade added on to the front of the lower half of the house that turns it into a business establishment. It looks like what it is—a neighborhood place, nothing fancy, plenty of ice-cold beer and fresh boiled seafood.
Diana stared at the neon Budweiser sign lighting up a picture window cut into the brick.
“We're going here to meet the love of Maurice's life?” she demanded.
“Their choice.”
“But I don't want to go in there dressed like this.” She pulled the cape close around her as if someone were going to try to rip it off. “Why didn't you tell me? I would have gone home and changed.”
“Hey, you look great,” I said enthusiastically.
“That is hardly the point.”
“Well, it was too late for you to change. It doesn't matter anyway.”
The way her mouth curled up on one side, I might as well have told her that money doesn't matter or that the American Dream is dead.
Just about that time a young guy wearing threadbare jeans and a Tulane T-shirt with the arms and neck cut out of it went through the front door.
“Do you want to leave your fur in the car and put my jacket on over your dress?” I asked her. The jacket was one of those lightweight all-weather deals, khaki.
She drew herself up, let the fur fall so it appeared to be casually slung over one shoulder, and said in her most imperious voice, “No thank you.”
We walked into the front room of Franky and Johnny's, which has a long bar against the left wall and a jukebox on the opposite side. The light from the jukebox bathed the room in purple, and a lavender sheen radiated from Diana's bare shoulder. Whenever the front door opens the beer swillers at the bar usually turn around to see who's coming in, and immediately lose interest. But they leered appreciatively at Diana, and as we went toward the back, one guy shivered with lust and called out, “What's hap'nin’, mama!” Diana flashed him an evil look. A couple of steps behind her, I gave the thumbs-up sign to the guy. Diana's pointed heels on the old vinyl floor snapped like reprimands.
The back room was the restaurant. From the luridly romantic light of the bar we emerged wincing into a bright fluorescent wash that is the trademark of a New Orleans seafood joint. Diana strode with certainty to a table for four in the rear. The man who jumped up from the table looked vaguely like my friend Maurice, but this man had the sleeves of a blue Oxford cloth shirt rolled up so he could eat the mound of crawfish in front of him, and he had on a pair of jeans. I stepped closer, squinting.
“Maurice?”
“Diana, Neal, this is Nita Greene.” The hand he gestured with dripped crawfish juice.
I did a double-take, to Nita, to Maurice, then back to Nita. She was Maurice's clone. I mean it. Her hair was longer than Maurice's, but it was the same color brown, parted on the right, bangs swept to the side above glasses. Hers were tortoiseshell. She had on an Oxford cloth shirt, too, white, button-down. If he was boyish, then she was girlish, both of them with their round faces and their brown eyes looking big and innocent behind lenses.
Diana and I sat down and I ordered another pitcher of beer and more crawfish, some of the first of the season. I was ready to dig in after a six-month-long abstinence. The princess, however, wouldn't eat crawfish. She declined to eat anything at all that night, preferring to let me know through food deprivation that she was not happy. She ordered a Dubonnet on the rocks.
As soon as the waitress left the table, Nita said, “Neal, doesn't Maurice look great?”
“Yeah, I was gonna say . . . yeah, you look great, Maurice.”
Maurice nudged her with an elbow. She angled her body a bit more in his direction.
“I told him he was too sexy to go around looking like a high plains undertaker all the time,” Nita said.
They both blushed and we all laughed. Diana dug her nails into my thigh. Then she pinched me when Nita picked up a big red mudbug and sucked its head.
Let me explain that no true New Orleanian eats the tail of a crawfish without first sucking the juices from its head. There's no way to describe it delicately, I suppose. It's not a delicate act. Which is why the princess wouldn't eat crawfish.
Nita asked Diana about her job at the hotel while she peeled a rung of shell from the crawfish tail and popped it out. As soon as Diana answered one question, Nita asked another. She was fascinated by public relations work. A couple more questions down the line and I detected a note of boredom creeping into Diana's voice.
“Why are you
so interested in public relations?” Diana asked finally. “I thought you were a photographer. Are you interested in doing photography for a public relations firm?”
“I take photographs,” Nita said, “but that's not how I make money.”
“She could if she wanted to,” Maurice interjected.
Diana looked at him for a moment, but her eyes snapped back to Nita. “Then why don't you?” she asked.
“I'm not sure I want to. Not yet. I'd rather take odd jobs and have fun with photography. I guess I'm afraid that if I get too serious about it, it won't be fun anymore.”
“What kind of odd jobs are you talking about?” Diana wanted to know.
“Clerical jobs, sales jobs, whatever I can get.”
“But nothing to do with photography,” Diana said.
“Well, no. I take the pictures I want to take.”
“So.” Diana sat back. “You're an artiste, not just some workaday drudge. Actually, that sounds fairly serious.”
When Diana said something like that, it was hard to know how to take it. Was she being serious, or was she goading Nita? Her tone betrayed nothing. I certainly didn't know how to take it. I looked at Nita, stole a sidelong glance at Maurice . . .
Nita knew how to take it—undaunted. “I don't think of myself as an artist. I don't want to take myself that seriously.”
“Then,” Diana said, “why not make money at photography, do portraits or some industrial photography or morgue photography—whatever you can get.”
Maurice spoke up, a little too loudly. “I believe, Diana, that Nita is trying to tell you that she'd like to nurture her art for a while. There's nothing wrong with that.”
This was making me awfully nervous. I have nerves of steel when it comes to entering dark places at night or finding the bodies of murder victims, but these social situations . . .
Nita, however, seemed determined to make Diana understand her point of view. She leaned toward her. “Look, I don't want to get bored taking pictures. I'd rather be bored answering somebody's telephone or being a file clerk. I want to feel alive when I'm behind the camera. I want to be intensely interested in my subject. But I don't want to be like those ambitious self-important artists either, who think their art is the most serious, most important thing in the world, and if they don't get into the right gallery, and if they don't get enough recognition, they want to die. If I try to make money doing what I want to do, then I have to deal with all that. I don't want to always be seeking someone else's approval.”
Diana tilted her chin back and stroked it with an index finger. “All that sounds pretty good,” she said to the acoustical tiles of Franky and Johnny's ceiling, “but are you sure you're not just afraid of rejection? Or failure?” Now she leveled her gaze at Nita. “Or could it be that you're afraid to succeed? Then you wouldn't be able to work so leisurely anymore. Are you afraid of hard work, or are you afraid of competition?”
Maurice, I could see, was hot. He started to speak, but Nita put her hand on his, and said to Diana, “Maybe I am afraid of rejection. Maybe I'm afraid of competition, too. I don't know. It's easier for me not to worry about those things right now. I'm not afraid of hard work, but I'll be honest with you, I'd rather work leisurely right now, and think about Maurice.” She smiled at him and closed her hand around his. “He's what's important to me right now and I like to concentrate on one thing at a time. But it just so happens that I'm also working on some portraits. No one's paying me and I can do them whenever I want to, and whenever the women are available, and I could get pretty excited about it. Eventually, I'll work it into an entire series of portraits.”
“What women?” Diana asked.
Nita wouldn't tell her who they were, but she went on about them, using words like grotesque and vulnerable, and phrases like slice of life, though she did say that all the women she'd taken pictures of so far were on the West Bank. Diana didn't sneer when Nita mentioned the West Bank, and after a while I relaxed and started to lose interest.
But then Diana said, “All right, Nita, I'll make you an offer, call it a challenge. At the hotel there's a small gallery. It's a space leading out to the courtyard where we showcase a single artist's work.”
Nita nodded. “I've seen it. Someone I know had a show there. It's very nice.”
“I've had a cancellation for January. Get fifteen or twenty portraits ready and I'll give you a one-woman show. We do a very elegant presentation folio and on opening night provide cocktails and hors d'oeuvres. In a month hundreds of people will see your photographs. We also have a good sales record, and we take a fraction of the percentage an art gallery takes. Just enough to cover costs. All you have to do is get the portraits done. We'll do the rest. What do you say?”
Challenge my foot. It was an outright dare. And Maurice didn't like it.
“I don't think so,” he said. “We have plans. We'll be tied up for most of January.”
That's right—he wanted to get married at Christmas, take a long honeymoon trip, I supposed. I was beginning to like Diana's challenge more and more.
Poor Nita, though. All this time, throughout Diana's grilling and her explanations, she had seemed very self-assured, especially for someone so young. Now she looked at Maurice, emotion obviously pulling on her. He'd given her an out, but she wasn't taking it. Part of her, at least, wanted to accept Diana's offer. There was a wicked smile curving Diana's mouth.
Nita looked at the red-checked cloth. “I don't know,” she said quietly. “No one's ever offered me a show before. I'll have to think about it.”
Diana said, “I'll need an answer within the week. You'll have to figure out if you have the time to do it. And the self-confidence,” she added. With that she got up and went to the ladies room.
None of us said anything right away. Then Nita was saying to Maurice, “I think I want to do it.”
“But we're supposed to get married at Christmas.”
I was on the edge of my chair, thinking I ought to excuse myself, but I waited too long.
“We haven't made any plans yet,” Nita said. “Couldn't we postpone it for a month? How about Valentine's Day?” she asked, trying to entice him. Then quietly again, almost shyly, “It's a good opportunity for me.”
“She's not doing it for you,” Maurice told her. He never was one to beat around the bush. “She's doing it to prove her point, or at least she's hoping to prove it,” he revised. “She's trying to make you do something you've already decided you don't want to do.”
By this time I was feeling quite sorry for Nita. She couldn't look at Maurice. She went back to examining red checks. “But she's right. I'm afraid of competition. I'm afraid of being rejected. I'm afraid I'll never be able to take a photograph that's good enough to sell. Even if she's not doing it for me, she's giving me the opportunity to get over all that.”
Maurice put his hand on the back of Nita's neck. “You'll get over it when you're ready to get over it,” he said as lightly as Maurice is capable of saying anything.
“You were never afraid,” Nita said to him. And then by some kind of tacit agreement, they dropped it, Maurice's hand falling off her neck.
The next thing I knew I was babbling away, trying to keep up my end of the chitchat, talking about playing pool and Murphy Zeringue and the boys over at Grady's.
Well, that did it. It turned out that Nita loved to play pool, and the next thing I knew Maurice was suggesting that we go over to Grady's Irish Channel Bar so Nita and I could play.
I want you to realize how remarkable this was: All the years I'd known Maurice, and all the times I'd asked him to go over to Grady's with me, he'd never gone, and now here he was suggesting we go over there—all because Nita liked to play pool.
I suggested, however, that we go to Robert's over on Calhoun and Claiborne instead, that it was closer. That's doubtful, and it's true that the best of the local hustlers, like Murphy, are at Grady's, but I don't like to take women there. Especially a woman like Diana. Especially dressed
like she was. If we went there, Murphy's pointed ratlike face might have to be surgically removed from her cleavage before the night was over.
“I can't believe you agreed to play pool with her.” She shot it at me as soon as we were alone in the car.
“Hang in there, princess.” I put the car in gear and slid from under a crepe myrtle tree. “We won't be long. I'll let her think she has a fighting chance before I wipe her out.” (I hate like hell admitting I said that.)
“Sure. And then we'll have to sit around and have more discussion about how sad and funny and grotesque and fascinating people are.”
“She said all that?”
“Neal.” Two syllables that carried a threat.
“She was just trying to tell you something about herself and her photographs.”
“Right. I'll bet her favorite photographer is Diane Arbus and that she reads Flannery O'Connor for inspiration.”
“Who? Give her a break, princess. She was trying to impress Maurice's friends.”
“God! All that lovey-dovey stuff—it's absolutely nauseating!”
“Is that so?” I asked, going for poignancy.
“I mean in a public place. Making eyes at each other, constantly touching each other . . .” She settled back in the seat, crossing her legs. “Do you think she'll accept my offer?”
“Dare," I amended.
“It's a perfectly legitimate offer,” she said testily.
“So it is. Quite generous, considering you've never seen any of her pictures. What if she's no good? Aren't you taking a chance?”
“I don't think so,” she said confidently, but I had no idea if she meant she thought Nita would turn out to be a good photographer or if she thought Nita wouldn't accept her offer at all.
Actually, my bet was on the latter. “Don't underestimate her, princess. I think she's going to do it, and you better hope she's good or you've just stuck your pretty little neck out way too far. She's got what counts—an awful lot of youthful exuberance.”