There was a steady whip and whir of a lawn sprinkler, and, in someone’s backyard, on an orderly red brick patio, hamburgers and hot dogs cooked over an open grill.
The sun broke from behind the last of the clouds and its light on the water of the backyard pond looked like scattered coins.
It was one of those rare and perfect days, thought Rogue, that couldn’t go any farther toward proving God’s existence than if He had left His fingerprints all over everything.
Rogue looked away from the window' set above the kitchen sink and adjusted the flow of water from the faucet.
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She was scrubbing and peeling potatoes, starting to get things ready for tonight’s dinner. She had already put the rack of lamb in the Dutch oven and basted it once with a mint sauce she had made, but she would need Remy’s help if she was going to have supper ready, the table set, and have a hot, relaxing bath before the guests arrived.
Behind her, the Frigidaire clunked as it proudly made another ice cube and started cheerily on making another, not content to rest too long upon its laurels.
At the thought of Remy, she glanced at the drain board of the double sink and the simple gold ring sitting there, where she had put it when she started supper. Apart from these rare times, she had not taken it from her hand since that day when, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, Remy had placed it there.
“We’ve had the worse and we’ve had the poorer,” she spoke to the sun-washed, airy kitchens, “now we have the better and richer to look forward to.”
She was pulled from her reverie by the crack of a softball against a bat and the cheers of children. She looked out the window just in time to see Remy waving the runner on to second. He was always involved with the neighborhood kids in some fashion, refereeing them in a game of touch football or coaching them in a game of softball. He was surprisingly at home with children—the kid in him, Rogue supposed. She didn’t mind him spending his Saturday afternoons with them, since it seemed most of the other parents were too busy for them, but she absolutely drew the line at his trying to teach them to gamble.
“Life’s a big gamble,” he had said trying to sweet-talk his way around her when she put her foot down. “Don’
lift 15 but 4 nm
think so? Then how come half of ‘life’ is made up of ‘if’? ~ ' Hey, why you t’ink life is but a dream?”
Rogue had laughed and responded, “I can play that one, too, swamp rat. ‘God is love, love is blind, Ray Charles is blind, therefore, Ray Charles is God.’ ”
“He is God!” Remy replied then. “Ray an’ Charlie Parker.”
“Head for home! Head for home!” Remy now shouted at the runner. The boy crossed the plate to the sound of cheers, just a split second ahead of the ball.
“Remy!” Rogue called from the opened back door. “Time f’you t’head home too, lover.”
Remy smiled and waved at her across the vacant lot. “Right dere, petite filleV' He said something else to the children and started jogging for the house. The sun, sailing toward the west where clouds waited to devour it, threw Remy’s shadow out long behind him, like a small, frightened child racing to catch up.
“Forks on de left or de right?”
But Rogue didn’t hear him. She was too busy checking the last of the arrangements. For the hundredth time.
“Sweet—forks—left or right?”
“That’s fine,” she answered distractedly.
“We havin’ red wine or white wit’ de elephant?” “Nowy’bein’ silly; y’know we ate the last of the elephant weeks ago.”
“Ah, so you are in dere somewhere!”
“Sorry, sugar. I just want everything to go all right tonight.”
Remy set the silverware aside and stepped around the
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dining room table to where Rogue stood, rearranging the fresh-cut flowers in the centerpiece. For the hundredth time.
“Everyt’ing be fine, chere. We’ve had plenty o’ parties.”
She smiled crookedly and corrected him. “We’ve been to plenty of parties, Remy. This is the first one we ever gave.”
“Every day a party in de Big Easy,” he said, taking her hand, feeling the warmth of her flesh next to his. “Every day a party if you live to de fullest.” And he nestled his cheek to hers, closing his eyes and slow-dancing to a music only he could hear. God, perhaps, or Bird. Or Mingus. “Po’ darlin’. Want so bad for us to fit in. Want so bad for us to be normal.”
“Is that so wrong?”
He looked at her and she could feel it then, building between them: a spark, an ember, slowly building, rising, threatening to catch their whole world ablaze.
“You already fit in, chere, where it matters most. In LeBeau’s eternal heart.”
He kissed her then and was still kissing her when the doorbell rang. Their guests had to wait a few minutes on the porch, and dinner was slightly dry, but Rogue found she somehow didn’t mind.
Scott and Jean Summers owned the mock-Tudor style house next door to Rogue and Remy; they had lived in the neighborhood for quite awhile before the LeBeaus, and naturally took them under their wing. It turned out they had all attended, at various times, the same exclusive school for gifted individuals, and that only helped to cement the blocks of
their friendship. Jean once asked Rogue how she had gotten that name, and Rogue replied, “M’mom’s like that.” That offhanded comment had sealed their fate and they were inseparable companions thereafter. Scott and Remy, two men unaccustomed to expressing their emotions, maintained a guarded but solid acquaintanceship, partly based on their mutual love of cooking. Remy had to admire a man who could go back for seconds on his four-alarm crawfish bisque. “Dat about de bravest t’ing Remy ever seen anyone ever do, mon ami,” LeBeau had said, only half-jokingly, and Scott had nearly smiled.
The Summerses often entertained, inviting Remy and Rogue over when they did, and they knew a wide assortment of people: Bobby Drake, a CPA frozen in the past, with a glacial heart that couldn’t be moved or warmed by all the lights of Christmas, it seemed; Henry McCoy, an obsessively brilliant but apish biophysicist who hid his insecurities behind a constant barrage of big words; Warren Worthington III, a foppish millionaire who tried to show the world he deserved his enormous wealth by giving vast fortunes away to charity and who tried to show he deserved love by being with a different girl every week.
All of them, it seemed to Rogue, were the walking wounded, all suffering some ancient, buried tragedy with an impossible grace and nobility.
But tonight, ah, tonight the Summerses had brought with them Logan, an odd, bestial, frightening, earthy, hugely lusty man who ate his meal ravenously, attacking it with his bare hands and issuing barely human grunts as he gnawed and tore the meat from the bone.
“Dat a man who know how t’grab life by de t’roat!”
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Remy exclaimed admiringly. “You grab ’im one for Remy, eh?”
“Grab ’im yourself, bub,” Logan replied around a mouthful of food, grease, and blood running down his chin. “I got some throat-wringin’ o’ my own t’do.”
Rogue started to laugh, needed to laugh very badly—he reminded her of the Tasmanian Devil from the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, all teeth and claws and appetite—but then their eyes met—locked like magnets slamming together— and Rogue felt herself deflate like a pricked balloon. He smiled, a smile that never quite reached the eyes, and she had the feeling that it was her throat he had grabbed, and he was grinding her to bone and blood and paste.
“Where on earth did y’ever find him?”
“Who? Logan?” Jean asked. She was helping Rogue clear the decimated table. “Friend of Scott’s. Met him in the Canadian woods. Don’t really know much about him.” She shrugged dismissively. “I think he might have been in some sort of intelligence outfit—maybe part of some top-secret experiment. He’s odd, but he’s harmless—if you’re on his good side.”
/> “Where’s that? Couple hundred miles away?”
Jean laughed and saw then that Rogue was serious; she was deeply disturbed by Logan.
“Sweetheart, I wouldn’t let him come around my house if he wasn’t harmless. We wouldn’t have brought him here. You know me; I’ve always been good at reading people.” Rogue touched Logan’s plate, littered with picked bones like a miniature desert, and shuddered. She quickly dropped the plate into the pile, as if touching it too long
would cause an empathy to form, somehow contaminate her, taint her, make her like him.
“And I can read you too,” Jean said, tipping Rogue’s chin up with her finger, forcing Rogue to look at her, look her in the eyes. “There’s something else at work here, something more than just feeling uncomfortable around Logan. Is it anything you want to talk to me about?”
“It’s nothin’, it’s . . . When you find the man you love, how come the honeymoon doesn’t last f’rever?”
Jean traced her finger along the contours of Rogue’s high cheekbones, a sister comforting her sibling, a mother soothing her child. “Welcome to marriage, phase two,” she said.
“Does it have t’be that way?” Rogue asked, and there was something like terror in her voice.
And now it was Jean’s turn to look away. “You wouldn’t be normal if it weren’t,” she said. “This wouldn’t be real life.”
“Well, like th’man says, ‘reality bites.’ ”
“It can,” Jean agreed, with her words at least, but not her voice. “It cuts and bites and tears, this life, but take heart. It only gets better.”
“You and Scott—y’all seem so happy... what’s y’ secret?”
Jean considered this for a long moment before answering. “Well, Scott’s my world—but he’s not my whole world, you understand? That’s too big a burden to put on him— or anyone.”
Rogue thought about that while Jean finished busing the table. There were greasy, bloody fingerprints on the table-
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cloth where Logan had sat. He would never take the place of a strolling violinist at dinner, that was for sure.
“I’ll help you with dessert,” Jean offered.
“What about kids?”
“I guess—but, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’d rather have cake and coffee.”
Rogue looked puzzled, then exploded with laughter, the first honest laugh Jean had heard from her all night.
In the den, lushly paneled and appointed with built-in bookcases containing many folios and first editions, and one wall comprised of a giant screen television, the latest stereo equipment and shelves bowed in the middle from the weight of jazz, blues, R&B, and rock CDs and vinyl, a room largely given over to the intellectual and emotional, Logan was holding court over Sazerac and cigars (Scott had neither), regaling the other men with his bawdy jokes and impossible exploits.
He had told them of hunting leopards with the Maharaja of Mysore and his subsequent dalliance with the emperor’s harem and barely escaping detection by the guards, of his time in Japan, and sailing from Nice to Morocco through a freak storm that nearly sank his small ship, and of owning a bar in Madripoor.
As Rogue and Jean entered the den bearing a tray of satsuma cake and coffee, Logan was in the middle of his tale of running with the bulls in Pamplona. He had been doing well, he said, until the man in front of him slipped on the wet cobblestones and Logan fell over him. The first of the bulls rolled over them both like a wave of hooves and horns. To save himself, Logan said, he grabbed on to the bull’s underside and held on for a mad, miles-long run through
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the streets of Spain. “It was that, or get trampled by Spain’s supply o’ toros.”
“That sounds like a lot o’ bull,” commented Rogue, a wry smile creasing the corners of her mouth, and everyone, even Scott, laughed.
“Good one, gal,” Logan said, puffing deeply on his smelly cigar. He took the dessert plate Rogue offered, surreptitiously stroking her finger with his. She withdrew as if she had just thrust her hand into a sack of squirming snakes and maggots. “You got a funny girl there, Gumbo. You better w'atch somebody doesn’t take ’er away from you.”
‘‘How ’bout it, chfre? Was it worth it?”
Rogue paused in the brushing of her hair, watching Remy in the mirror of the vanity. “Yeah, I think so.”
Remy laughed. “Dat Logan, he a character, don’ you t’ink? De stories he tell, chere, you wouldn’t believe. He stop jus’ shy o’ claimin’ credit for advisin’ God on dat sun in da mornin’, moon at night t’ing. He want Scott an’ Remy t’go huntin’ wit’ him sometime, get in touch wit’ our ‘hairy homme.’ ”
Irrational fear squeezed her heart with icy, skeletal fingers. “I don’t want you to go,” she said hurriedly, breathlessly.
''Qjioi?”
“I don’t like him, Remy. There’s somethin’ about him, he makes me feel so—” {alive) “—afraid. Please . . . promise me . . . stay away from him.”
“You serious?”
He saw she was.
“Okay. I promise.”
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She seemed to relax, visibly, and returned to brushing her hair. Remy stood behind her, watching her silently, like a ghost. “Is dat all? All dat’s bothering you, I mean?”
That was a good question, the only one. Was that all that was bothering her? Really?
No. No, she couldn’t honestly say it was. But how could she tell him that, although she loved him more than ever, more than anyone or anything, something had begun to feel wrong between them? Something she herself would be hard pressed to name, other than to say he wasn’t the man she had met and fallen in love with. Some vital, elemental spark had seemingly gone out of him and somehow ended up in Logan.
And could she honestly say it was only Logan whom she didn’t trust?
Was there any reason the honeymoon couldn’t last forever?
But that wouldn’t be normal. Jean had told her so. It wouldn’t be real life, and, in real life, things change. People change.
“ Chere? Somet’in’ else botherin’ you?”
The look on his face, so like a lost little boy, and she felt love for him well up from the bottom of her heart and soul and spread out and engulf the both of them.
“Nothin’ as bad as all that, sugar,” she said with a barely contained enthusiasm. “I just wanted to wait till the right time t’tell you—I’m pregnant!”
Remy’s jaw dropped and his mouth worked without forming words. He tried again and did marginally better this time.
“Remy a daddy? How? When? How long you known, gal?” ‘
“I just found out m’self.”
Remy moved to her, where she sat on the seat before the vanity, took the golden brush from her hand and set it aside.
“A baby, chere,” he said softly, wonderingly, in awe of this oldest everyday miracle of all. “Remy a daddy.” This time it was not a question, but joyful declaration. He held Rogue to him and she thought she felt the warm salt of a tear on her exposed neck and shoulder.
“It best be a girl, fille, so it get her mama’s beauty. Double Remy’s joy.”
“Double or nothin’, huh?”
“Remy bet on worse odds,” he said, and something else occurred to him then. “Hey, but what you ain’t tol’ LeBeau is when? When de baby due?”
“Well...” She smiled enigmatically, and when he looked at her again, he wondered how he had not noticed her enormous girth before. Was he that blind? “As a matter of fact...” she said.
“Push harder! Push!”
“I am pushin’!”
“You squeezin’ Remy’s hand kind o’ hard, chere—”
“As bad as this hurts—y’lucky—y’hand is all I’m squeezin’!”
“There’s the head! Doctor Xavier, there’s—”
“Remy can see the head, cherel It. . . it. . . oh!” “Somebody revive that man and get him out of the way.
”
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* * *
“I tell you, it was Remy’s low blood sugar ...”
But nobody was paying any attention to the proud father; all eyes were on the mother and the small tenant who had just been evicted from his tiny amniotic apartment, reclining in their hospital bed. Through the unrolling of the day, Rogue had had several visitors, her own mother, Raven Darkholme, first among them. She had given her pronouncement that the baby—a boy—was “good—he doesn’t look a thing like his father and, mercifully, nothing like his uncle.” After her visit, Rogue assured Remy that was simply her mother’s way of expressing her approval.
“What she say ’bout Remy wrhen you marry him, den?” “Oh she really expressed her approval then,” Rogue answered, and they both laughed.
There had been others, and Scott and Jean had been by twice. On their second visit, Rogue and Remy asked them to be the baby’s godparents.
The day nurse, Ororo, brought Charlie (they had decided to name the baby Charles because he looked like Xavier—bald and serious) in for his afternoon feeding. Ororo was Rogue’s favorite of the nurses because she was like a grace note in the discordance of the hospital.
“He’s such a good baby,” Ororo said, smiling. “So perfect. He never cries, even when he’s hungry or wet. What’s your secret?”
“No secret,” offered Remy. “He got perfect parents. Don’ you know7 we ain’t human?”
Rogue shivered, then. The baby was perfect. Remy was almost giddy. Her mother was pleased. Even the nurse admired their happiness. So why wasn’t she content?
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A shaft of late-afternoon sunlight angled through the window and fell on the family tree, painting everything in the room the color of fool’s gold.
She returned home with the baby. Her crusades were little ones, waged against grass and chocolate stains, dingy floors, and balancing the checkbook. Day after meaningless day blew past with the bland uniformity of sand.
She was dusting the gilt-framed portrait of Remy, Charlie, and herself when the doorbell rang. She returned the photograph to its place on the piano and answered the door. She was expecting it to be Jean, dropping by with the new Crichton book she’d promised to lend her, but her heart gave a wild, surging leap, banging against her ribs like a wild bird in a cage when she saw her caller was— “Logan?”
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