Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  The woman had hair the color of champagne and a silky dress like lime sorbet. She smiled at me without showing her teeth, and my phone rang in my pocket.

  I smiled back and rolled my eyes, mouthing “Excuse me” while I turned.

  “You comin?” Cerise said. Not hello, how are you? She was my sister-in-law. Even though my two older brothers had left my two childhood friends, the women they’d married right when we got out of high school, Clarette and Cerise were still my sisters. “Tomorrow is five years, Fantine. They lookin for you to come home. Your maman and mine cookin right now.”

  “I’m at a work thing,” I said softly. “And I just got off a plane. I’ll be there tomorrow.” I walked to the bar, picked up a glass of the red wine, and moved to a different window, hearing laughter.

  “Where you been?” she said. That was the question I heard every time from my family. Wherever I’d been, it wasn’t as important as being home.

  “Switzerland and France.” I knew she wouldn’t ask me anything about either place.

  “So you might drop by, huh? If you ain’t too busy.” Cerise sounded pissed, like she did every single time we talked. She was mad at me for being in LA, mad at my brother Lafayette for leaving her and their kids, and mad at Glorette for being dead.

  “Fantine!” she whispered harshly. “You didn’t never see her anymore! But I saw her all the time.” Cerise was crying now. “If I went to get my nails done. Or at Rite Aid. She went in there for a break.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I tried to imagine what Glorette had looked like by then.

  “She would just smile and say, ‘Hey, girl,’ like it wasn’t no big thang she had a bruise on her neck.”

  “Cerise,” I said. “I’m coming tomorrow.”

  “Shit, Fantine,” she said, her voice sharpened, clearing of sobs. I knew it was always good that she could hate on me for a minute. “Fly round the damn world every week and cain’t drive sixty-two miles home. Uh-huh.”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said, and she hung up.

  I took two long swallows of the wine. The sour fullness washed my throat, went behind my eyes. An older man smiled at me and lifted his own glass. “Lovely merlot from the Rio Negro Valley in Patagonia. They made sure to buy Argentinean wines.”

  I nodded and took another sip. He said, “Are you working with Arthur? Are you with the publisher?”

  “No,” I said. “I work for magazines.”

  “Ah!” He stood beside me now. His face was that classic combination of silver eyebrows, blue eyes, and pinkish cheeks. The blush was really a mesh of fine red veins, a net of blood rising to the skin.

  “I’m with his publisher now. I’ve finished my first book. Arthur teases me by calling it another Greatest Generation tome. World War Two, you know.”

  The last swallow of wine settled in my chest. “My father was in the war,” I said.

  His eyebrows moved like pale moths. “Really? Which front?”

  “In France somewhere. He never said the place.”

  “He didn’t talk about his experiences,” he said, nodding.

  I put down the empty glass on a beautiful ebony-wood table and gave him my best sigh and rueful grin. “He’s not much of a talker.”

  “Well, he could have been traumatized. Where does he live now?” the man asked.

  “Here,” I said, moving back toward the bar. “California.”

  “You’re a Los Angeles native?” Clearly he wasn’t.

  “No, I’m from Rio Seco. An hour east of here.” And a different universe. He held out a card, and I took it. GERALD JOHN FITZGERALD. PROFESSOR EMERITUS—BOSTON COLLEGE, DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY. “THE WORTH OF THE WAR.”

  “My da had a sense of humor when he named me,” he said, smiling so widely the little string separating his front teeth showed.

  My hand was engulfed in his. “FX Antoine,” I said.

  “No! With that name, you’ve got some Irish in you, too. And Spanish, no doubt.”

  “It could be,” I said, and then my phone rang again. I looked down at the number. “I’m so sorry—this is my godson. I’ll be right back.”

  “Your godson?” He didn’t believe me. His whole face collapsed, the blushing cheeks redder. “Well, yes. As always, with the Electronic Generation.” He actually bowed and turned away.

  My own face was hot when I flipped open the phone and sat on the little black leather bench near the front door. “Victor?”

  “Marraine! Where you been?” He was in a car. The music was so loud it vibrated through the phone like a dull roaring. “I think I called you six times,” he said.

  “Switzerland,” I said. “I just got back today.”

  “You see paintings?” He always asked what I’d done, and I tried to describe the museums and mountains and buildings to him. I usually brought him a print, but I had gotten him something bigger this time.

  “I saw a panoramic painting. It was what came before movies.”

  “What was it about?” He was trying not to shout.

  “War.” I closed my eyes. “It’s called The Bourbaki, and it takes up the whole top floor of a building.” The painting circled around my friend Jane and me. Moroccan soldiers in their tasseled uniforms, their red fezzes like biscuits on their heads. Surrendering in the snow of Switzerland in 1871.

  “That’s all you gon tell me?”

  “Hundreds of soldiers coming back from a battle in winter during the Franco-Prussian War and being taken care of by Swiss villagers. Dead horses. Blood in the snow.”

  He was silent, but that just meant he was thinking. Like me. Then he said, “You didn’t tell me about The Who. Professor Zelman gave me ‘Baba O’Riley.’ ”

  “What?”

  He started singing into the phone. “ ‘Out here in the fields, I fight for my meals! I get my back into my livin!’ ”

  Someone in the car yelled, “Shut up, nigga. Fitty Cent just came on. Let him sing.”

  “If you call that singin,” Victor shouted back.

  “Who are you with?” I asked, trying to sound neutral.

  “Zee and Fonso.”

  Jazen and Alfonso. He’d never hung out with them in high school. Alfonso had just gotten out of prison; Clarette, who was a correctional officer, had told me. Jazen and his Navigator owned the streets near where Glorette was killed. Didn’t Victor know they might have sold his mother the rock she’d smoked that night? Boys—no, they weren’t children anymore. Glorette had Victor when we were seniors in high school. Bettina had Alfonso the year before. They were young men. But no one ever used those words anymore. They were dudes, bangers, bros, guys. Fools.

  Victor said, “You gave me the hookup with the iPod and Professor Zelman gave me the hookup to The Who. They rock.”

  “He’s pretty cool for a professor,” I said. Zelman had given him an award for best essay and for top honors student at the city college in Rio Seco. Victor had just graduated in June.

  “ ‘I don’t need to fight—to prove I’m right—I don’t need to be forgiven!’ ”

  A deep voice came from the background. “Fool, I ain’t tellin you again.” Jazen. He drove the Navigator, and ran the show.

  Victor was silent for a moment. The room was nearly full of people now, and two more women came through the open door. The leather bench was so low to the floor all I could see were knees and shoes. Strappy green sandals and sensible pumps.

  “Marraine,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Where are you?” I said.

  “We’re comin to LA! I won tickets to a concert, and we gotta pick em up.” But then he must have held the phone closer. He whispered, “I was so happy about the tix cause I been thinkin about tomorrow. You know. And I just wanted to—tell you.”

  I said carefully, “About tomorrow? Are you okay?”

  He said softly, “I stayed at Fonso’s mama’s house last night. She got faded on some Hennessy. You know what she said? She said she saw my pops play the flute once at
a club, with my moms. I put some Yusuf Lateef on my headphones and I was thinking about it all night. He didn’t even stay till I was born. Hated me before I even came out. And I can’t even sing.”

  I closed my eyes and saw his father. Sere Dakar. Perfect Afro like a black dandelion. His long fingers on the flute.

  Victor said, “Wanted to tell you about The Who. Can’t tell nobody else.”

  We stayed quiet for a minute, inside the drumbeats.

  Then Victor said, “Can I stay at your place for a while?”

  “What?” I felt the humming fatigue in my head, and the thumping music from the phone made it worse. “Today?”

  “Yeah. The concert’s on Saturday.”

  “Victor,” I said. “I don’t know. I just got off a plane. I’m at a reception.”

  “Is the conversation desultory or erudite?” he said, his voice light again.

  “Very funny.” I was the one who’d taught him the SAT words, for the test he never got to take. “Let me call you back.”

  His voice rose. “You know The Who said the F word on the radio? Way back then?” Then he whispered, his mouth right up on the phone, “Marraine—you light a candle? For my maman? Do you still pray? I don’t.”

  He hung up.

  My back pressed against the wall covered with textured plaster. The entry foyer had a dark rattan rug and, across from me, a wooden pew with carvings on the armrests. Above it was a wooden figure, sitting on a shelf. The ceilings were so high that the room felt like church. The Virgin Mary looked down on me.

  Who are you—Who-oo? Who-oo? Tell me who the fuck are you?

  Victor had written some good essays for Professor Zelman—on the violin used in the Creole music his grandfather loved, on how the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Average White Band were white guys even a black guy could love. He wrote a great piece on falsetto love songs of the 1970s and ’80s and how they worked on women of a certain age—Cerise, Clarette, and me. Not his mother.

  But I didn’t want Jazen and Alfonso anywhere near my place. I wanted to be alone, thinking about the Bourbaki panorama painting and the Aare River, red geraniums like fireworks in the window boxes. I could pick up Victor in Rio Seco tomorrow, when I drove out there. I leaned my head against the wall.

  Mary’s blue robe was decorated with the fleur-de-lis. The royal lily.

  I had been in a cathedral in Reims, France, with a group from college, during our semester abroad. The guide with her lovely French accent showed us the stained glass windows. I was staring at the colors and the light, and she said, “That figure was created during the crowning of the dauphin. Do you see the yellow bits on the blue robe? The fleur-de-lis—they are reserved for the royalty.” Her voice was so proud. I first thought of Marie Antoinette, because I was nineteen and still believed royalty was romantic, and then I heard my ancestor’s name in my forehead.

  Moinette Antoine. She was branded on the shoulder with the fleur-de-lis after she ran away and was captured. She had escaped to find her mother. Which shoulder? Like livestock. Live. Stock.

  I stood up and felt dizzy. Arthur Graves said to someone, “I’ve heard the Los Angeles River is over there, amid the tangle of those warehouses, but I can’t be sure, of course, because it’s not as if it’s an actual body of running water, right? You tell me, darling.”

  Out here in the fields, Victor sang. I fight for my meals. Moinette Antoine had been out in the cane fields. After the branding, her friend Fantine had tied a piece of salt meat on the burn—the flower. The two women who gave me my name.

  I went back to the bar and took an empanada with another glass of wine. I wanted to wash out my skull. I’d had coffee and breakfast in Zurich, and water and tomato juice on the plane ride. The wine erased some of the hot sand resting behind my eyes. Back at the tall windows, I looked outside at the alley, the homeless men. Even from here I could see the big guy holding up his palms to the sky in a gesture like surrender to his laughing friend. His palms were pink as roses.

  The phone shook again in my hand, and when I opened it, Victor said in a low voice, “Marraine? Don’t forget me. I need to get out of here. I need to be in LA with you.”

  Before I could say anything, he hung up.

  When Glorette showed him to me for the first time his eyes were tight lines like knife slits in a skull, and his mouth was open wide with cries. No teeth—the screaming rode down a flume of pink tongue.

  I hadn’t paid attention when Bettina had Alfonso, but Glorette with Victor scared me so badly that I never wanted to have sex again, never wanted to think that the mouth fastened on my neck—Marcus Thompson’s mouth—and the tongue sweeping along my collarbone would deliver me into a baby. My own teeth imprinted on Marcus’s neck, so that everyone would know we’d been together—we both needed that badge back then.

  Don’t forget me—Victor’s voice quiet and clotted with sadness. I was not his mother. I had never been a mother. I hadn’t even slept with a man for almost a year. I hadn’t stayed anywhere long enough, and hadn’t found anyone interesting enough.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the sentences moving around the pale cement walls. Because where I had grown up, the older people spoke French most of the time, and even their English sounded French, many times I heard American phrases as if I were from another country.

  “Oh my God, did you get her galleys? The new memoir? What a wack job.”

  “Whoa,” someone else said. “You’re shitting me. The guy said that?”

  “Yeah, no, absolutely,” a woman answered. “I can’t wrap my mind around it.”

  In the bathroom, I ran cold water on my fingers and dragged them across my throat. It had been rainy in Thun and Bern, when I followed the Aare River. I called Tony.

  “Please come to this stupid party,” I said. “Rick really wants you here. And I haven’t seen you in two weeks.” He was the one person I wanted to talk to. Not Victor. I leaned my forehead against the limestone counter.

  “It’s Wednesday,” he said. I heard the TV. The loft walls were so thick that party noise only entered under the door, like a cartoon ribbon of laughter.

  In the mirror, my hair was held firmly by shiny gel in a tight bun, my collar still crisp and white. “I know,” I said. “But you can’t keep mourning like this.”

  “Why?” Tony said, his voice blurred and angry. Scotch. “You left me a message that you had to go to some five-year anniversary of death tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re right. But can I come by?”

  “In a while,” he said, and hung up abruptly. I smelled the white candle burning on the counter. Jasmine? Gardenia?

  I returned to the window. Arthur Graves had a different woman in tow, pulling her toward the view. She smiled wide at me and said, “LA’s not much of a skyline. Even if everybody’s moving downtown.” She was messing with him. She leaned in close to me, long silver drop earrings brushing her bare shoulders. “I love your shirt,” she said. “Where did you get it?”

  Arthur Graves focused on my face and said, “And who is this lovely vision? You look as if you’ve just arrived from Buenos Aires! Doesn’t she?”

  I smiled, and they waited. I did look Argentinean. Or Andalusian. Maybe a tanned Angeleno.

  The woman touched my sleeve. “Thanks,” I said. I had twenty different white cotton or linen shirts, and twenty black ones, and that was all I wore. I had gotten the idea when I was sixteen, looking at photos of Carolina Herrera and Audrey Hepburn. My face was taupe. Neutral. I held up the sleeve, which was edged with shiny whiter embroidery. “Oaxaca. They have beautiful clothes.”

  “I love Oaxaca! Is that where you’re from?” she asked, leaning closer. “Mexico? I went to Oaxaca on this shoot for Elle once.” She put out her hand. “I’m Jesse James Miller.”

  “FX Antoine.”

  Her voice was excited but confused. “You’re FX Antoine?” She was trying to reconcile my face with what I wrote. My photo was never in magazines. I wrote odd narratives about pe
ople and food and landscape, and I never mentioned myself. She said, “I loved your piece on Bath.” She was studying my hair.

  I could be Saudi or Hawaiian, Mexican or Italian.

  “You wrote that great piece on South Carthay for Angelena. God, I was sad when that magazine went under.”

  I nodded. I’d written a monthly column about different neighborhoods where LA women might like to spend a day—unexpected places like South Carthay, Beverlywood, Palms. Places no one might have thought of for lunch.

  “Wait—you wrote that piece on Springsteen’s Jersey Shore. Where Tony Volpe’s from. You work with him, right? He’s amazing. Is he coming by?” The wineglass trembled a bit in her hand. She was a Tony fan. Everyone was a Tony fan.

  “Probably not,” I said.

  “So, are you from Oaxaca?”

  The wine was so dark it looked like cherry Kool-Aid, and I tasted that chemical sweetness on my back teeth. Glorette and I used to drink black cherry Kool-Aid on my mother’s porch. Our arms sealed together by sweat, our backs against the wood shingles of the house, singing Chaka Khan. “ ‘Tell me somethin good—tell me, tell me, tell me …’ ”

  And then those voices stored inside the memory of my cell phone, in my pocket, next to my thigh—they said, Fantine. You comin home? Your maman cook for everyone. Fantine. Call me. Call me. Don’t forget me. Tell me somethin good.

  “Louisiana,” I said. “My parents are from Louisiana.” I wanted to bite back the words as soon as they’d left my mouth. The sun was hot on my back, through the window. In my pocket was a boarding pass from Zurich, but also a coffee bean for luck, from my mother.

  Jesse James Miller said, “Wow—and is that where you’re still based? New Orleans?”

  What was she? Blond, but with streaks of brown. Her nose was wider and flatter than it could have been, and her lips were framed by those smoker tributaries in the skin. Her voice was the honey-nicotine kind, her camisole top silky and purple.