“Uh huh.”
“You’re afraid that I’d break up with you because you are going away to school?”
“That’s part of it.”
“Sarah, I love you. A giant tattooed psychopath couldn’t tear us apart, and he tried pretty hard. I’m sure as hell not going to let a few hundred miles get between us.”
“There you go again, saying the right thing … Now the big question: how literally do you mean it?”
The question didn’t really blindside Jeremy. From the moment she had said grad school he had been pretty sure that part of what she was afraid of was that he wouldn’t follow her to school. But even though he had been expecting it, it still felt like he had been hit with a brick. It was just so fast.
He stalled by kissing her. He knew that she probably knew he was stalling. He knew he was only buying a few seconds, but he also knew that if she saw his face fall she would never forget it. No matter what he ended up doing, she would always remember his initial reaction.
He ended the kiss and said, “Sarah, I’m not going to lose you to something as trivial as an area code change.”
She recognized his answer as a dodge, but it was close enough to what she wanted to hear that she let it slide.
Saturday March 1st
Noon
Harper had been getting a little stir crazy so he decided to head into New Orleans for the last few days of Carnival. That was the nice thing about being self-employed; he could pretty much do what he wanted when he wanted. He was so good at following his whims that all his friends thought he was retired. When it came right down to it, he basically was. He only worked a couple of days a month, and only a couple of hours on those days. He just wasn’t greedy enough to do more than that. He only stole a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of stuff a month. It would be easy to steal a lot more than that, but then it would (a) start to seem like work, (b) make it more likely that he’d get caught, and (c) be more than he really needed. He liked his life – he drank beer, read a lot of mystery novels, watched TV and played the harmonica on his front porch. He just didn’t have all that much need for a lot of money.
He got to New Orleans on Saturday and got lucky enough to find a hotel room. It was in the Central Business District, a bit away from the heat of the French Quarter, but not too far. He had brought his bike and didn’t mind a little commuting. He wasn’t happy about the cost of the room, but he knew that every hotel in town was charging as much as they could legally get away with.
He spent Saturday on Canal Street watching a couple of parades, drinking a lot of beer and watching the young girls flash for beads – just good clean American fun. He started talking to a reasonably good-looking woman, who got better looking with every beer, at one of the parades. He thought things were going rather well with her, but after the parade she just left. Oh well, at least she left before he could get interested in her, or interested in anything beyond the physical anyway.
Sunday was a lot like Saturday, a lot of beer, a lot of beads, a lot of boobs, a little flirting whenever he could.
Monday rolled around and Harper needed to find a distraction from his hangover, at least until he felt well enough to drink again. He was wandering around in the Quarter looking for some good greasy hangover food when he saw a bunch of people standing in line. He figured they knew something he didn’t. It didn’t take him long to figure out they were standing in line for a tour that was about to leave. It didn’t sound good, but it sounded like more distraction than sitting around somewhere with nothing but his hangover for company. So he grabbed a hot dog at the corner and shelled out fifteen bucks for the Cemetery Tour.
The guy giving the tour was named Dexter and was dressed like somebody out of A Christmas Carol, but knew his stuff. The tour would have probably been fun if Harper had felt better. The tour started with a talk about old burial customs in New Orleans, how they used to plant people in the ground, and what happened when it flooded. (Some of the coffins would pop up and then have to be put back down.)
If the guide was to be believed, there were still old graves under some of the houses in the French Quarter, because periodically they would move the whole graveyard as the town expanded, but not everybody would feel like paying to dig up and move their relatives. All this stuff was interesting, but as near as Harper could tell it was mostly just to give the guide something to talk about while they walked to the St. Louis Cemetery.
They wandered around the cemetery for a while with Dexter talking about how one tomb was good for a nearly unlimited number of relatives, as long as they only died at the rate of one per year. A year was enough for the old corpse to get crumbly enough to pack a new one in. It was all interesting, but the highlight of the tour was Marie Laveau’s tomb.
Dexter described some of the things that made people think Marie could work miracles. She knew things that people thought she would have no way of knowing, and she could be in two places at once. But it was all tricks. Marie had a network of paid informers that kept her ahead of the gossip game, and a daughter who looked so much like her that she could be her twin. Having a twin made it remarkably easy to be in two places at once.
But even after he told them that Marie was nothing but a good businessperson, Dexter went on to tell them about how people would still ask Marie for favors, even though she was dead. Then he said something that really surprised Harper – Dexter confessed that he had on occasion requested assistance from Marie, and that he had indeed received it. To hear someone who sounded as smart as Dexter say they believed in a practice like that hit Harper pretty hard. If it could work for Dexter, maybe it could work for him. The tour moved on but Harper stayed behind.
He hung around until nobody was too close, and then kneeled down in front of the tomb. He untied his right shoelace, just so he could tie it again and it would look like he had some reason to be kneeling there, other than talking to a dead person. Under his breath he said, “I don’t know if I should tell you this part, but I don’t believe in this. But I also figure that the only way to find out for sure if something works is to try it. So here I am. I don’t know how you could help, but I want to find a way out of what I am doing now. I’m tired of being scared of the law, but I don’t want to go back into trucking, and that is the only other thing I know how to do.”
Right as he finished speaking he got knocked over by a teenage boy, and then another just barely missed stepping on him. The first, a lanky kid in jeans and a flannel shirt, alternated between apologizing and yelling at his friend for chasing him. If it hadn’t hurt, Harper would have found it pretty funny. As it was he just growled at them to be more careful.
The two kids helped him up, and, after another round of apologies, ran off laughing and punching at each other. Harper remembered being young and stupid, and while he wished he was young again, he was glad he wasn’t stupid anymore.
It wasn’t until he stopped to buy a drink that he noticed that his wallet was gone. In an instant he realized that the punks had picked his pocket. He had worked hard to steal that money, but he couldn’t feel all that bad about it. Easy come easy go … Unfortunately, he lost about twelve hundred dollars in cash, and that left him with the problem of how to pay for his hotel room.
Sometime around his divorce he had become a strictly cash type person. Partly it was because his ex had raped him financially. About the time she had decided to leave him, she had adopted the policy of ‘what’s yours is ours and what’s ours is mine.’ She had drained their accounts and maxed out their credit cards. She had even taken out cards he hadn’t known about and maxed them out. Then she left, and somehow he got stuck with all the bills. They repoed his truck, which had been his only source of income. It wasn’t long after that that he declared bankruptcy.
He never bothered to try to fix his credit, because he still technically owed all those creditors money. Besides, once he became a burglar, he figured that the fewer record
s there were of his financial dealings, the better. He did have a credit card, but it was one of those secured cards, where the company holds your cash and pretends it is credit. That could take care of a couple of hundred dollars of his bill, but he was going to have to find a way to find the rest. He was going to have to make this a working vacation. He was going to have to find a place to burgle.
Monday March 3rd
Noon
Sarah and Jeremy were eating lunch at Yo Mama’s. She didn’t like the place as much as he did but she didn’t mind it either. She understood that sometimes places just felt right to people, and if the bar registered as home to Jeremy she was happy to eat there.
The conversation started amicably, but then the topic of grad school had come up.
Sarah was excited about grad school. Jeremy was dubious; he had never seen the virtue in most degrees. Why get a degree in English when reading was free? Accounting, that was something to get a degree in, because accounting jobs required accounting degrees. Other than that, if you loved something enough to study it, what did the piece of paper matter?
Jeremy finally asked the question he had been wondering since she had told him she had been accepted. “Since what you want to do is act, why do you need a diploma?”
“Jeremy, I would love nothing more than to earn my living by acting, and if I get the chance I’ll jump at it. But I know the odds. Maybe one actor in a hundred ever supports themselves by acting. And probably only one in a hundred of those go from acting job to acting job with nothing in between. For everybody else, work boils down to finding a way to pay the rent between gigs. So, yes, I need a backup plan.”
“But aren’t you afraid that by having something to fall back on, you won’t be pushed as hard to go where you want to go?”
“I don’t think my odds of a big break would go up if I was living in a cardboard box, but it might make it sweeter when I got the break. Life is full of compromises. I could hurt my career by finding steady work acting, if working meant I missed a chance somewhere else. Success is finding a way to have someone pay you to do something that you would do if they didn’t pay you. The way I see it, if I can’t act for a living, the next best thing is to do something related, like teach other people how to act.”
Sarah paused and then added. “You know, it might not be a bad idea if you went to school.” She loved him, but she desperately wanted to put him on the path to gainful employment.
“To do what?”
“Have a backup plan. Oh wait, you’re living your backup plan, except it’s a backup to the plan of dying young. Maybe it’s time that you had a plan, so you can keep having a backup.”
Jeremy couldn’t argue with that, so he changed the subject. “So, who is throwing the party tonight?”
Sarah let him change the subject. She knew that minds were seldom changed by fights. She also knew that they weren’t really fighting about the value of education, they were fighting about her leaving New Orleans. “His name is Bob. I know him from school. I’ve never been to one of his parties, but I hear they are pretty spectacular.”
“For a theatre person to call a party spectacular says a lot.”
Sarah’s eyes opened wide and she nodded slowly, emphatically in agreement. “The stories I’ve heard …”
The check came, Jeremy paid and they stepped outside.
Outside the bar they kissed. Sarah said, “I’ll see you tonight,” and flitted off. She had errands to run.
Jeremy was confused. Things had been tenser in the bar than he had wanted. There had been a tension for the last week, ever since she had first told him about grad school.
Why did it have to be like this? He wandered toward Jackson Square, thinking about the things he would be giving up if he left New Orleans to be with Sarah.
In the square he watched a team of jugglers for a little while – two men and a woman. They had an interesting mix of talent. One of the men was managing to twirl a flaming devil stick about twenty feet in the air, while the other seemed only barely able to keep his spinning at all. Jeremy decided that one was the master and the other was his apprentice. The girl (the longer Jeremy watched the more she seemed like a girl instead of a woman) seemed to excel only in wearing a skimpy outfit and holding up a tip bucket. She was wearing a feathered carnival mask.
Jeremy became fascinated by the implied story. How had the three met? Was the girl old enough to be out living the nomadic life of a street performer? Who was sleeping with who? He filled in the blanks and decided that she was a runaway, and that was why she was covering her face. In his little fiction, the better juggler was juggling the other two, probably sleeping with both.
As the performers built to a climax, Jeremy looked for signs to confirm his story. The girl looked worried as the younger guy threw a variety of dangerous things at the elder: a machete, a torch, an apple. The girl explained that he was going to make an apple pie ... cut the apple with the machete and cook the pieces with the torch. Though he didn’t get around to cooking them, the juggler did manage to cleave the apple and adjust to having four objects in the air. That was close enough for the crowd, who applauded on cue.
Jeremy offered the girl a five dollar tip for a peek at her face. She shook her head. He tossed the five into the bucket anyway.
Not far away a forest of camcorders was springing up. Jeremy sighed. When he had first come to New Orleans, flashing at Mardi Gras was common but somehow in the last few years the flavor of it had changed. Jeremy blamed the videos. The videos skipped the good part, the interesting part, the “will she or won’t she” part, and jumped straight into being an endless parade of breasts. As near as Jeremy could tell this had had two effects: one, the average guy assumed it was his right to be flashed if he gave a girl beads; and two, the average girl understood that anything she did might end up on a DVD watched by her father.
The net result was that fewer women flashed (though those that did probably did more often) and that a lot of guys were increasingly obnoxious. Jeremy had even seen a group of guys get mad at a stripper on a balcony when she wouldn’t flash for beads. She was on the balcony, trying to get people into the strip club, so why would she give them a show for free? It hadn’t made sense, but it was typical.
Jeremy didn’t know how it was possible for a bacchanal to lose its innocence, but it seemed to be happening to Carnival in New Orleans.
A lot was changing, now that he thought about it. More and more locals were leaving, forced out by higher rent or taking advantage of rising real estate prices. Artists and musicians were leaving and being replaced by the kind of people who buy timeshares because they think they love the French Quarter, but then turn around and complain because it gets too loud at night. They were the sort of people who would move to a forest, and then chop it down because the trees blocked their view.
Feeling grim, Jeremy went back to his house.
Monday March 3rd
8:00 p.m.
Jeremy spent the afternoon doing some recording while waiting around for customers or the garden. By eight o’clock, when Sarah knocked on his door, he had a rough version of a decent song and three hundred dollars in his pocket.
Seeing her on his doorstep, dressed as an angel, took Jeremy back to the first time she had come to his house. It had only been a month – well almost a month – but it felt like a lifetime. Her wings made her awkward to embrace, but he managed to pull her into a kiss that lasted long enough to cover a range of good emotions, from a happy greeting to horny to a soothing warmth. The right kiss might not ever actually solve any problems, but it can reveal how small they are in comparison to what lies under them. It was the sort of kiss that is inevitably followed by a few moments of hand holding and eye gazing.
Eventually, Sarah spoke. “Wow. Wow. Can I come inside now?”
“You can come, you can stay, we can blow off the party and …”
Sarah did
n’t step inside, and didn’t let him finish. “Nuh uh. No party blowing.” She paused, grinned, and added, “I think we should just go ahead and go. I don’t need you tempting me to stay.”
“But you’re still dressed for work?”
“You think I’ll be out of place dressed like this at a theatre party? On Lundi Gras? Bob’s a costume designer; I want him to see this getup. Knowing him, he’ll probably wave a magic wand, spend two minutes in his closet, and make it ten times better. Now come on, put your shoes on and let’s go.”
“But …”
“No buts. Grab your shoes. Oh, and maybe a guitar if you want. Hurry up, I want to show you off.”
Her tone was playful and utterly devoid of any of their recent tension. Jeremy decided to run with it, and in less than a minute they were out of the house.
Bob lived in the Marigny, the neighborhood adjacent to the Quarter, only a couple of blocks away from Jeremy’s house. Bob was smoking on his porch and saw the couple approaching. When they reached his door, he greeted them with cups of punch.
Bob was a large man – thick, but not muscular. He was wearing floral printed silk, which contrasted with his chainmail bracelet. His voice was high and soft. “C’mon in, make y’selves to home. It’s not often I get one of the seraphim callin’ at my door, and I’m not about to make the same mistake those silly boys in Gomorra did. I do enough of what those silly boys in Sodom did, so I’m certainly not about to turn my back on an angel. Sarah hon, let me look atchah. You are a sight, but …” Bob trailed off, held up one finger, and swished down the hall.
Sarah gave Jeremy a ‘see, I told you’ look. Jeremy shrugged. He felt the time was ripe for a clever comment, but he had nothing. Bob returned before they even started to wonder if they should wait for him.
“Sarah, I do love ya wimple, but I think it’s just a little plain. It belongs on a nun, holdin’ her hair back so it don’t get in the way of her prayer. It’s fine for what it is, but you are an angel, come down to smite or save. You need something a bit more … grand, doncha think?” He held up a piece of jewelry that wasn’t quite a tiara – it was a full circlet, with tines that poked up in the front, but also baubles that hung down, and what could be described as a hairnet made of chain in the middle. He placed it on her head, over her wimple. “I picked this little bit of nothing up for a show a couple of years ago, but it was way too small for the queen who was supposed to be wearin’ it. So it’s just been gettin’ in my way, clutterin’ up the place. I’m glad it’s finally found a home on your head.” As Sarah had predicted, the accessory was a small change, but a vast improvement to her outfit.
The Whisper Garden Page 20