Corina's Way

by Rod Davis

  He figured the set for a short but high-intensity show stopper. Reasoning that the all-white choir was in context a novelty act, he had seen the key to success as a brief, but decisive, appearance. And he was pretty sure that’s what Reverend Lincoln wanted, too. It had taken most of Jean-Pierre’s powers of persuasion and years of volunteer efforts at the parish churches to convince Albert Lincoln the white girls should get a place on the program.

  But an appearance was all Jean-Pierre wanted, even if it was at six in the evening on Thursday, when the big crowds wouldn’t yet have formed and the day people were going home to dinner. Houston felt the same. He didn’t seem to care at all when the Academy was scheduled to appear or for how long, just that it would happen.

  Jean-Pierre remembered the afternoon he called Houston with the news that the choir had been put in the show. “Son of a bitch,” he’d said. “I’ll be goddamned.” And then he had poured out masses of thank-yous. When they met the next day to work out an audition and practice schedule, Houston’s face had the blue aura again, but also something else—a faraway look Jean-Pierre couldn’t place. And then he remembered where he had seen such a look. He remembered his mother slumped in her chair behind the altar near the end of a service.

  “. . . On a hill, far away . . .”

  The piercing note caused Jean-Pierre to wince, but it snapped him back into today’s work, the last round of the tryouts, and he kept on playing. Unfortunately, the acoustics in the Academy’s Performing Arts Theater, which most recently had witnessed the senior drama class presentation of The Glass Menagerie, were quite good. Merciless, for the slender soprano on stage before him. Her voice could hit the scales but it cracked too much and wasn’t big enough to carry. It was also very white. They all were, except for that big basketball player and maybe one other, the little blond named Cissy. But some were too white.

  He glanced sideways at Houston, who seemed to understand, too, and marked an X by the girl’s name. Jean-Pierre played out the rest of the stanza, then raised one hand to signal the girl to stop. She smiled and walked off the stage. As she left, she looked back, trying to hide her curiosity. She must have seen the exchange between Jean-Pierre and Gus, because her face suddenly clouded and they could hear a door banging behind the curtains.

  “How many we got left?”

  “We’ve got ten you said were okay.”

  Jean-Pierre looked down at the keyboard and at his slender fingers. He thought a moment. “That’s enough.”

  “That only gives us two extra if we use eight in the choir.”

  “You expect some kind of sickness at this school?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “Then we got enough. Need to, we can go with seven or even six for the show. As long as we got that big girl and that other one, the alto. After that it doesn’t really matter much.”

  “You don’t like them.”

  Jean-Pierre looked up. “Why you say that? I didn’t say that.” He ran a quick scale to renew his ears. “They all sing pretty good. Question is whether they can get where they need to for Gospel. They need a lot more . . . ‘timbre’ I guess is the musical word.”

  “Fine, but do you think they can compete?”

  Jean-Pierre laughed. “I didn’t say nothing about competing, if you mean winning. Zero none chance of that, Chaplain.” He hung on the word a little longer than necessary. “You never said they had to win. Just get in the show.”

  “I know. But I mean, will they be embarrassed? More to the point, will I? I got a lot riding on this.”

  “Like I don’t?”

  “Okay, we both do. So can you feel happy putting this group you been looking at today up there on May Day?”

  Jean-Pierre stood up. “Why you call me if you going to sit there and question my judgment? Would I say these girls can go if I didn’t think they could? You think I don’t know how to choose a choir?”

  Gus put up one hand. “Okay, okay. That’s not what I meant.”

  Jean-Pierre sat back down. He hadn’t really intended to leave, but in dealing with white people he often felt it necessary to put up a line of demarcation of power early on. He felt slightly foolish doing it with Houston, since the man had come to him clearly begging him to take charge, but perhaps it was a scene worthwhile.

  “Let’s look over the list of who’s left one more time then.”

  Houston slid it across. The point of turning back had been breached long ago. They were in. Jean-Pierre looked over the list carefully, putting faces to the names. “She sounds black, this one,” he said, pointing to Cissy’s name. “This one, too.” He indicated Charlotte. “Rest are good enough for backup.” Jean-Pierre slid back across the piano bench and began a slow warm-up to “Power,” his mother’s favorite soul-shaker. “They gonna love us or hang us from a lamp post.”

  “Make sure they love us, then.”

  Jean-Pierre continued playing the song. Houston looked at his watch, got up. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  Jean-Pierre looked at him questioningly.

  “Time to inform the lucky winners.”

  As Houston walked out, Jean-Pierre picked up the tempo, the volume. He banged the keys hard. After a moment her realized he was humming to himself, which he usually only did when he was angry. Or afraid. He played on for another half hour. Outside, though classes were over for the day, a half-dozen girls stood near the auditorium’s rear doors, peeking in to see the grim-faced, thickset black man playing and singing with such force, and wondering what the weeks ahead under his tutelage would be like.

  Bonita made Gus go with her to the doctor, because she wanted him to be a part of whatever was said. And because if it wasn’t her who had trouble getting pregnant, but him, she wanted him to be there when the doctor said so. Only it wasn’t either one of them. It just wasn’t her time.

  “I just didn’t know it was that big a deal for you,” Gus said, driving home.

  “It wasn’t, but it is.”

  “It better be. Now I have to whack off in a tube.”

  “I’m sure it won’t be the first time.”

  He skimmed a yellow light at Napoleon Street. Neither spoke. In Gus’s mind was a familiar loop of an old tape. He felt his body bound to the earth at the very moment it longed to soar into the heavens. He did not want to Occupy Space. In Bonita’s mind was the knowledge of what Gus was thinking, that he was in the wormhole; also, a determination that it was now, in her life, that she would have her baby. It was with this man. He was smart, he was reasonably good looking, he had no major health problems. He would do. Moreover, she loved him. She wasn’t debating it anymore.

  Corina had given it context. Bonita had not even been aware of wanting to become pregnant. But that time her period was late woke her up. In wondering if she would have a baby, she realized she did. Now that she realized it, she could not dismiss the desire.

  If Gus didn’t want a baby, that was his problem. She could feel the tension across the car, but he’d just have to deal with it. He was plenty old enough. Older than her. What would he do, leave just because he didn’t want to be a daddy? As she watched him through the heavy traffic heading toward home, she knew that he had already made a decision he might not even have been aware of.

  Or he may have. The knowing may have brought back the vision of Elizabeth Hapsenfield’s breasts—

  “Gus—”

  “Shit.” He jammed the brakes, veered hard to the left, and just missed a flatbed truck backing out of an auto parts store driveway.

  “You better keep your mind on the road.”

  “Yeah.” His hands were tingling slightly and he felt a tremble in his legs. He had scared himself.

  When they got home, neither spoke. Gus took an iced tea out onto the porch and watched the park. He wasn’t thinking about Elizabeth anymore. He was thinking about which of the girls should go in
the front row of the choir and which in the back, and he was thinking about what would happen with his referrals to Corina in the summer, when the girls went home, and he was looking at a squirrel in a tree about fifty yards away. He was thinking about the thing that gnawed at souls, and that were unknown. Or had no names. The shrinks had no vocabulary for this, nor the philosophers. Funny if it worked out that the preachers did.

  He had no idea where he was, for the day had been difficult. Yet why? He had merely done what thousands—millions, zillions—of men had done, had always done and always would do. He had gone with his woman to the medicine man to ask if she would bring forth a child. And the doctor had said yes. Of course, the sperm count test was a modern variation, but the basic orchestration was eternal.

  All he had to do was beat off in a bottle, although he knew it wasn’t really necessary because he’d been tested once and had sperm to spare, but the doctor wanted to “cover all the bases.” And Bonita had to take her temperature—God, it was horrible beyond belief. In the prime of his life, in the moment of his access to fame and maybe money, he was having sex with a test tube and his woman was sticking a thermometer between her legs. All in pursuit of progeny! He drank tea and thought he would explode.

  Bonita walked around in front of him. She had changed into shorts and a loose T-shirt. Without a word, she straddled his lap and took his head in her hands. She made him look at her. They looked at each other for what seemed a very long time. Her brown eyes were brimmed with something, and Gus realized his were, too. It was true, he loved her. It was a terrible emotion, considering.

  “I was lost, now I am found . . .”

  But the verse was wrong. You stayed lost.

  She leaned forward to kiss him. “I love you.”

  “I do, too.”

  She raised her shirt and pressed her right breast against his mouth. He cradled it with his hands and sucked on it. Then the other.

  “Come with me.”

  He followed her into the living room. That was as far as they got. She dropped her shorts. Gus’s eyes went immediately to her slender hips and the dark hair around her thighs. A fury of clothes and hands, he stripped off his own shirt and jeans. His cock was so hard it scraped against his zipper. She dropped to the floor and took him into her mouth. She could feel his knees shaking. He said, “I want to fuck you.”

  She pulled away and turned on all fours, her ass to him. He stuck his cock in and pounded against her buttocks. She came almost at once and then, to her surprise, again. Then he did.

  She collapsed forward, her breasts squeezed against the throw rug.

  “Roll over,” he said. “Put your legs up.”

  She turned her head slight to see him. He was on his knees, helping her turn onto her back, and drawing her thighs and calves up into an inverted V.

  “It’s like mashed potatoes. You got to keep the gravy from spilling out.”

  “What?”

  A trained forensic psychologist of the future, scraping away the remains of the brain in Gus’s skull, might have detected in the electro-residue of the remark (all thoughts, all speech, leave footprints in the brain, had we but the means to detect them) the subconscious association with school cafeteria lunch food. But Gus was not making such associations and would have banned them had they appeared because this Space was what he Occupied and he was not somewhere else. Nor did he want to be, despite the skull scrapings that twenty-fourth century archaeologists might someday find that would say, as they always had said, that the great flaw in the development of the human mind was that it was never able to regulate itself with any real significance.

  She said, “Fuck me some more,” and her saying it made him hard, and he did. If it was not on that day that they made the baby, who could doubt the hour would not come round at last?

  18

  Elizabeth was as Gus had never seen her. She was happy. “My God, have you seen this?” she said, breezing into his office with a copy of the Times-Picayune stretched out ahead. She was reading from an editorial:

  It is rare and reassuring amid this city’s ongoing racial unrest for an institution such as Miss Angelique’s Academy to take upon itself the bold and openhearted effort to reach out into the rest of the community. Through a novel, if long overdue, decision to participate in this year’s Jazzfest, this most traditional of New Orleans institutions has served notice that it is a part of the community at-large. And not just Jazzfest—the Academy has been invited to perform in the Gospel Tent.

  Not least because of the—let us be honest—élite nature of this traditional, expensive, and almost totally white school is its offering, however symbolic, to be commended. Many of our city’s other institutions, from Mardi Gras krewes to corporate offices, could learn the wise lesson from these young women of the Garden District.

  We are delighted to offer this month’s “Thumbs Up” to Agon and Elizabeth Hapsenfield, the delightful and imaginative forces behind the school, for their bringing of new ideas and social initiative to the city.

  Elizabeth flopped into the leather couch, beaming. “And then it says to turn to Section F for the story on us that girl came out and wrote.” She clutched the paper to her breast and seemed to blush. “I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. You are truly a sweet and wonderful man.”

  Gus squirmed a little in his chair and pretended to look at his blank computer screen. It helped, of course, that the Picayune’s publisher’s daughter, now a journalism major at LSU, was an alumnus of Miss Angelique’s and that the sports editor’s fifteen-year-old was currently enrolled. But once you have their attention, you still have to show them something, right? So Gus accepted the praise.

  “I really mean it,” she said. “At first I wondered if the Jazzfest idea was, to be honest, any kind of thing for the Academy to be involved in. But I have to tell you it’s just the best, the very, very best! And then the story!” Elizabeth flipped the paper open to the “Life and Times” section, where the front page was filled with a very flattering picture of her surrounded by the eight girls selected for the choir, which she had named “The Voices of Angelique” for the occasion. At the back stood Gus and Jean-Pierre.

  Gus moved around to the front of his desk and read along with the headmistress. He could smell her perfume, feel her heat, but this was not the moment for that. They scanned the article slowly, though each knew the other had already seen it: Gus over coffee at home, and Elizabeth at five a.m. when she went out to collect the newly thrown paper, as she had been doing all the last week. But he pretended for her, as she, perhaps, pretended for him, because it had been made clear from the inception that honesty was not to be the foundation of their relationship.

  She read aloud from the second column in Section F.

  “‘Mrs. Hapsenfield had always seen the Academy as a way of molding not just the student, but the character of the student, and when her chaplain’s assistant, Mr. Houston, sketched the idea to her, she seized it at once’—” Elizabeth looked at Gus. “I guess they embellished it a little.”

  “Not that much. You’re good at seizing.”

  She smiled, a little, and read more. Gus remembered the reporter, Caryn Ames, a young woman just out of Auburn who’d been put on the education beat. She was smart but a little gullible, and Elizabeth had played her like a fiddle.

  But the maestro had been nervous as a cat waiting for the orchestration to unfold. In truth, Gus had put it out of mind. He was far too busy with choir practice to think about set-ups in newspapers, the kind of thing he’d done in some previous gigs. Not to mention Bonita wanting to procreate all the time (lab results: sperm to spare), but Elizabeth’s anxiety had been more than enough to go around. And now all was well. Gus had played it right. Chaplain schmaplain. Next year he’d be able to pick any job at the school, at double his salary.

  As they were reading, Angie Ballew peeped in.

 
“Oh, I see you saw it. I guess they didn’t get Mr. Hapsenfield in it much, did they?”

  Elizabeth barely looked up. “I think they got the main characters pretty well.”

  “Ciao,” said Angie. She’d been into foreign phrases spring semester. “Got to run.” She looked at Gus and she looked at Elizabeth. Then she was gone.

  Elizabeth folded up the paper and said something Gus couldn’t hear. Then, “Well, I have to get back out front. I expect the phone’ll be ringing off the wall from the parents. Might be a good time to remind them of our fund drive.” She looked at the door to see if anyone was there, then leaned over and kissed Gus on the mouth. She licked his lips with her tongue.

  “Nice doing business with you.”

  “Nice to be done.”

  She studied him a moment, and was gone. Gus walked to his window, peered out, went back to his desk. He sat down. Some time passed; he wasn’t sure how much. He was smiling.

  “Hey, Mr. H. What’s so funny?”

  Gus focused on the young woman at the door—Brittany Anderson, he thought was her name. It didn’t really matter.

  Jean-Pierre knew where Ocho lived from Maria. In the time they were together, they had driven to his apartment complex out Chef Menteur Highway one night because Maria was scared that Ocho might be following them or stalking her. But his car was home and the lights were on and Maria had decided she was just a little paranoid. At least on that night, Ocho was innocent. Now he was not. Now he had the blood of Paulus all over him and he was not going to get away with it.